Available From UC Press

This superb anthology brings together some of the most powerful and compelling writing about the Grand Canyon—stories, essays, and poems written across five centuries by people inhabiting, surviving, and attempting to understand what one explorer called the "Great Unknown." The Grand Canyon Reader includes traditional stories from native tribes, reports by explorers, journals by early tourists, and contemporary essays and stories by such beloved writers as John McPhee, Ann Zwinger, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, Linda Hogan, and Craig Childs. Lively tales written by unschooled river runners, unabashedly popular fiction, and memoirs stand alongside finely crafted literary works to represent full range of human experience in this wild, daunting, and inspiring landscape.

Lance Newman, Professor of English at Westminster College, has worked as a Grand Canyon river guide for twenty years. He is the author of Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature as well as two chapbooks of poems, 3by3by3 and Come Kanab: A Little Red Songbook.

“I’ve been on his raft in the Grand Canyon, so I can attest to the fact that Lance Newman can row through both the currents of the Colorado River and the many literary tributaries that have given us great literature on this most unique of American places. The canyon is so many things to so many people: a holy land, an incision into the deep time of geology; a place of great and dangerous adventure; an imperiled landscape and a site in which to think about what our relationship to the natural world could and should be. Newman’s superb anthology gives us splendid selections that carry the reader along on the current of the best and most varied nature writing.” —Rebecca Solnit, author Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

“To really understand the wonders of the Grand Canyon, we need to see it through the eyes of others. In this reader, Lance Newman opens that world to us. The Grand Canyon of Craig Childs is a long way from that of Colin Fletcher, not to mention John Muir or Joseph Ives, but Newman guides us confidently through all these perspectives and many more. He has selected well, and we are the richer for it. Read this book.” —William C. Tweed, author of Uncertain Path: A Search for the Future of National Parks

“These are the Canyon’s literary ‘greatest hits’ alongside lesser known but extremely interesting accounts. Demonstrating an impressively refreshing range of perspectives and experiences, this is a remarkable anthology of 500 years of human interaction with the Canyon.” —Michael Branch, co-author of The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mounts and Shenandoah Valley