The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1999
“A landmark in the scholarship about John Muir and the developmental power of wilderness.”—John C. Elder
Learn more or buy a copy at: UW Press Amazon IndieBound
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Find in your local library via WorldCat
To read reviews, click here or scroll down to “Reviews” below
Articles and book chapters (see note below*):
“Early California Nature Writers,” in A History of California Literature, ed. Blake Allmendinger, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015 Find in your local library Read online (access required) Free PDF of unedited author MS: Holmes – Early CA Nature Writers
“John Muir: Brief Life of a Scottish American Conservationist, 1838-1914,” Harvard Magazine, Nov.–Dec. 2014 Read online (open access) Free PDF: Harvard Vita
“Muir, John,” entry in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Bron Taylor and Jeffrey Kaplan, general editors, New York: Continuum International, 2005 Find in your local library Read online (access required)
Book review: God’s Wilds: John Muir’s Vision of Nature by Dennis C. Williams, in Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society, September 2005 Read at JSTOR (access required ) Free PDF: Williams review
“Why Read Wolfe Today?,” preface to new edition of Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003 Free PDF: Why Read Wolfe Today
“Rethinking John Muir’s First Summer in Yosemite,” in John Muir in Historical Perspective, ed. Sally M. Miller, New York: Peter Lang, 1999 Find in your local library via WorldCat
“Place Making, Sacred and Erotic: John Muir and a Mountain Meadow,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 81, no. 3–4 (fall/winter 1998): 397–412 Read at JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: JM Mountain Meadow
Book review: John Muir’s “Stickeen” and the Lessons of Nature by Ronald H. Limbaugh, Journal of American History, June 1998: 263–64 Read at JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Limbaugh review
“John Muir, Jeanne Carr, and Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Case-study of the Varieties of Transcendental Influence,” Journal of Unitarian Universalist History 23 (1998): 1–25 Read online at HathiTrust Free PDF: Holmes – Muir Carr Emerson – JUUH 1998
Reviews of The Young John Muir:*
James M. Aton, in The Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 232-33 Read on JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Aton review
Timothy J. Babalis, in Church History, vol. 71, no. 3 (Sep., 2002), pp. 678-79 Read on JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Babalis review
Mark V. Barrow, Jr., in The Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 76, no. 1 (March 2001), pp. 57-58 Read on JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Barrow review
Peggy Champlin, in Isis, vol. 91, no. 3 (Sept. 2000), pp. 605-606 Read in JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Champlin review
Thomas K. Dean, in The Annals of Iowa, vol. 60, no. 1, 64-66 Read online (open access) Free PDF: Dean review
Ronald Eber, in The John Muir Newsletter, vol. 11, no. 2, Spring 2001 Free PDF: Eber review
“I wonder if we are attempting too much with this type of biography. … [J]ust because Muir left us such an incredible record of his life doesn’t mean it has to be micro-analyzed. Can we ever really know why Muir became Muir?”
Michael Edmonds, in The Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 83, no. 4 (Summer, 2000), pp. 285-86 Read at JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Edmonds review
“Unfortunately, his prose suffers from many defects common to technical scholarship. Psychoanalytic jargon abounds, and readers unfamiliar with it will find the book off-putting, at best. Holmes’s desire to explicate theoretical subtleties often leads him into seemingly endless, labyrinthine sentences, such as the seventy-six-word leviathan that spans pages 29 through 30. Readers who value clear, concise prose will wade through such quagmires reluctantly. Holmes sometimes reads far too much significance into minor passages in Muir’s writings, allowing his eagerness to demonstrate theoretical sophistication (this was a dissertation, after all) to get the better of his common sense.
“Despite these drawbacks, The Young John Muir is a brave and challenging book.”
Patricia Jasen, in The American Historical Review, vol. 105, no. 3 (June 2000), p. 940 Read on JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Jasen review
Ron Limbaugh, in The Pacific Historical Review, vol. 70, no. 1. (Feb. 2001), pp. 133-34 Read on JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Limbaugh review
Sally M. Miller, in Environmental History, vol. 4, no. 4 (Oct. 1999), pp. 582-84 Read on JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Miller S review
Ian Tyrrell, in The Journal of American History, vol. 88, no. 2. (Sept. 2001), pp. 661-62 Read on JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Tyrrell review
For discussion of The Young John Muir in the context of environmental biography as a field, see:
Miller, Char, “An Open Field,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 70, no. 1 (Feb. 2001), pp. 69-76 Read on JSTOR (access required) Free PDF: Miller C – An Open Field
*Please consider accessing scholarly work online, through the official channels indicated above – doing so both supports scholarly publishing in general and helps raise the profile of my work within those channels. (For those of you without institutional access to JTOR, you can sign up for a free account that gives access to 100 articles a month.) Otherwise, feel free to download and read the PDFs offered above, for personal or scholarly use; any distribution or reproduction beyond “fair use” is subject to the usual copyright restrictions and procedures.
Steven Pavlos Holmes, Ph.D. 