About The Library of America

Founded in 1979, The Library of America is an award-winning nonprofit publisher dedicated to preserving America’s best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts.  Hailed as “the most important book-publishing project in the nation’s history” (Newsweek), this acclaimed series now features over 250 volumes, including several dedicated to the seminal nature and environmental writings of John James Audubon, William Bartram, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau.

If you’ve enjoyed American Earth, continue your exploration of our literary heritage with these classic titles.

Henry David Thoreau

A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod

This Library of America edition collects for the first time in one volume the four full-length works in which Henry David Thoreau combined his poetic sensibility, classical learning, philosophical austerity, and Yankee love of practical detail into literary masterpieces on humanity's communion with nature.

Surely if one were to write perfectly, one would write like Thoreau.—Washington Post Book World

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John James Audubon

Writings and Drawings
With 64 full-color plates

The breathtaking art of John James Audubon's Birds of America has been celebrated throughout the world since it first appeared over 150 years ago. Less well known is Audubon's literary legacy: the magnificent volumes of natural history he published during his lifetime, as well as the remarkable journals, memoirs, and letters left behind at his death. In this unprecedented collection from The Library of America, Audubon the great nature writer takes his rightful place alongside Audubon the artist.

Audubon's word-work has been collected elsewhere and expensively, but this volume is the best value yet.—The News and Observer

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John Muir

Nature Writings

In a lifetime of exploration, writing, and passionate political activism, John Muir became America's most eloquent spokesman for the mystery and majesty of the wilderness. A crucial figure in the creation of our national parks system and a far-seeing prophet of environmental awareness who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, he was also a master of natural description who evoked with unique power and intimacy the untrammeled landscapes of the American West. The Library of America's Nature Writings collects his most significant and best-loved works in a single volume.

The richness of Muir’s writing roots deeper into the terrain than any other wilderness writer.—Los Angeles Times Book Review

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William Bartram

Travels and Other Writings
64 plates, 16 in full color

Artist, writer, botanist, gardener, naturalist, intrepid wilderness explorer, and self-styled "philosophical pilgrim," William Bartram (1739–1823) was an extraordinary figure in eighteenth-century American life. The first American to devote himself to what we now call the environment, Bartram was the most significant American writer before Thoreau and a nature artist who rivals Audubon. He was also a pioneering ethnographer whose works are a crucial source for the study of the Indian cultures of southeastern America. The Library of America presents the first collection of his writings and the largest gathering of his remarkable drawings ever published.

An achingly beautiful bible of what the American landscape once was. —Philadelphia Inquirer

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