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John Muir: Bibliography

Books by John Muir

• Studies in the Sierra (1950 reprint of serials from 1874)

• Picturesque California (1888-1890)

• The Mountains of California (1894)

• Our National Parks (1901)

•  Stickeen

• My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)

• Edward Henry Harriman (1911)

• The Yosemite (1912)

• The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913)

• Letters to a Friend (1915)

• Travels in Alaska (1915)

• A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916)

• The Cruise of the Corwin (1917)

• Steep Trails (1919)

• The Life and Letters of John Muir by William Frederic Badè (1924)

• John of the Mountains (1938) letters edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe.


Books About John Muir

Branch, Michael P. (ed.) John Muir’s Last Journey. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001.

Brinkley, Douglas. The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960. New York: Harper, 2011.

____. The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. New York: Harper, 2009.

Carr, Jeanne & John Muir. Kindred and Related Spirits. Salt Lake City: University of Utah   Press, 2001.

Cohen, Michael P. The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

Engberg, Robert and Bruce Merrell. Letters from Alaska: John Muir. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.

Erlich, Gretel. John Muir: Nature’s Visionary. Washington, DC: National Geographic. 2000.

Fox, Stephen. John Muir and His Legacy: the American Conservation Movement. Boston: Little Brown, 1981.

Hanna, Wanda Muir, Linne Marsh Wolfe, ed.  John of the Mountains: the Unpublished Journals of John Muir. Cambridge, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press, 1938.  (Renewed 1966 by John Muir Hanna and Ralph Eugene Wolfe.)

Gifford, Terry, ed. John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings. Seattle, Washington: The Mountaineers, 1996.
_____. John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books. London & Seattle: Diadem Books,  1992.

Gisel, Bonnie J. Nature's Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir's Botanical Legacy.   Berkeley: Heyday, 2009.

Heacox, Kim.  The Making of the National Parks. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2001.
_____. John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America. Guilford Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2014.

Highland, Christ (ed.) Meditations of John Muir: Nature’s Temple. Berkeley: Wilderness Press, 2001.

Holmes, Steven J. The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

Hunt, James. B.  Restless Fires: Young John Muir’s Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf in 1867-68

Lyon, Thomas J. “John Muir, the Physiology of the Brain, and the ‘Wilderness Experience.’” The Living Wilderness, Summer 1974.

Miller, Rod. John Muir: Magnificent Tramp.  New York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 2005.

Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind (revised edition). New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1973.

Rawls, James J. “John Muir: Celtic Saint.” California Environmental Conference, October 28, 2006.

Rowthorn, Anne (ed.) The Wisdom of John Muir: 100+ Selections from the Letters, Journals, and Essays of the Great Naturalist. Birmingham: Wilderness Press, 2012.

Stetson, Lee.  The Wild Muir: Twenty-Two of John Muir’s Greatest Adventures. Yosemite Conservancy: 2013.

Williams, Dennis C. God’s Wilds: John Muir’s Vision of Nature. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002.

Winkley, John W. John Muir, Naturalist: A Concise Biography of the Great Naturalist. The Nashville, Tennessee: Parthenon Press, 1959.

Wolfe, Linnie Marsh. Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

Worster, Donald.  A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Young, Samuel Hall. Alaska Days with John Muir. New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1915.


Articles by John Muir

• “American Forests” Atlantic Monthly, No. 80, August 1897. (Muir revised this article as chapter 10 of Our National Parks) (University of Virginia)

• "Edward Taylor Parsons” Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. IX, No. 4, January, 1915

• “Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park,” by John Muir, The Century Magazine, September 1890

• "The Hetch Hetchy Valley,” by John Muir, Boston Weekly Transcript, March 25, 1873. (Muir’s first essay about Hetch Hetchy - quite different from other Hetch Hetchy writings.)

• “The Hetch-Hetchy Valley,” by John Muir, Sierra Club Bulletin January, 1908. (Later revised and included as Chapter 16 of Muir’s 1912 book, The Yosemite.)

• Victorians and Meadowlarks: Two Muir Letters Rediscovered (John Muir Exhibit)

• A Letter from John Muir to S. Hall Young, May 31, 1910 (John Muir Exhibit)

• Mount Shasta and John Muir - his writings from the Mount Shasta Collection at College of the Siskiyous Library:

• “Reminiscences of Joseph LeConte,” by John Muir, The University of California Magazine (September 1901)

• The National Parks and Forest Reservations by John Muir (Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club Held November 23, 1895.) Published in Sierra Club Bulletin, 1896

• Save the Redwoods by John Muir, Sierra Club Bulletin (Volume XI Number 1, January 1920)

• “A Rival of the Yosemite; The Cañon of the South Fork of Kings River, California,” by John Muir, The Century Magazine, November 1891

• “Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta" by John Muir, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1877 September (with illustrations)

• “The Treasures of the Yosemite,” by John Muir, The Century Magazine, August 1890

• Victorians and Meadowlarks: Two Muir Letters Rediscovered

• “Yosemite Glaciers” by John Muir, New York Tribune, December 5, 1871

• “Yosemite in Winter” by John Muir, New York Tribune, May 7, 1872

• “Yosemite in Spring” by John Muir, New York Tribune, December 5, 1872


Selected Passages by John Muir

• “Man’s Place in the Universe" originally published in Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916)

• “Mountain Thoughts" written by John Muir during the 1870s, collected by Linnie Marsh Wolfe in John of the Mountains (1938)

• "Damming Hetch Hetchy" excerpt from Muir’s Unpublished Journals, c. 1913 (Sierra Club California)

• "The Calypso Borealis" excerpted from The Life and Letters of John Muir 

• “The Earthquake” from Our National Parks (1901)

• “Mount Ritter” from The Mountains of California (1894) The Water-Ouzel, Chapter 13 of The Mountains of California (1894

• “Wild Wool” from Steep Trails (1918) A Wind Storm in the Forests - Chapter 10 of The Mountains of California by John Muir (1894).