Philip L. Fradkin 
Everett Ruess 
His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife

Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the canyonlands of southern Utah, spawning the myth of a romantic desert wanderer that survives to this day. It was 1934, and Ruess was in the fifth year of a quest to record wilderness beauty in works of art whose value was recognized by such contemporary artists as Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. From his home in Los Angeles, Ruess walked, hitchhiked, and rode burros up the California coast, along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and into the deserts of the Southwest. In the first probing biography of Everett Ruess, acclaimed environmental historian Philip L. Fradkin goes beyond the myth to reveal the realities of Ruess’s short life and mysterious death and finds in the artist’s astonishing afterlife a lonely hero who persevered.

Tabella dei contenuti

I. Davis Gulch 

II. Wanderers 

III. The Legacy, 1859 – 1913 

IV. Growing Up, 1914 – 1929 

V. On the Road, 1930 

VI. Lan Rameau, 1931 

VII. The Misfit, 1932 

VIII. The Bohemian, 1933 

IX. Vanished, 1934 

X. The Search, 1935 

XI. Healing, 1936 – 2008 

XII. Resurrection, 2009 

Appendix A

Wilderness Song 

Appendix B

Father and Son Dialogue 

Acknowledgments 

Notes 

Selected Bibliography 

Index 

Circa l’autore

Philip L. Fradkin is the author of twelve highly praised books, including Wallace Stegner and the American West and The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself, and (with Alex L. Fradkin) The Left Coast: California on the Edge, all from UC Press.