Adventurous author, pioneering reporter, workaholic newspaper editor, passionate Indian rights activist, librarian, poet, anthropologist and archeologist, Charles Fletcher Lummis was a great colorful individualist who explored and popularized the American Southwest. In 1884, with a job offer to become City Editor of the Los Angeles Times, Lummis determined to walk to his new job from Ohio, covering over 3,500 miles through 8 states and territories....

From the recipient of the 1997 Whiting Award. Feeling disconnected from the wildly beautiful desert that she has known intimately for twenty years, award-winning writer Ellen Meloy embarks on a search for home that is historical, scientific, and spiritual. Her "Map of the Known Universe," devised to guide her quest, reveals extraordinary details of a physical link between the atomic age and her home on Utah's San Juan River. The Map grows to include...

Standing atop the wall of California, Michael Checchio decided to head out for Saline and Death Valley, the canyonlands of Arizona and Utah and the uplands of New Mexico. He would re-visit old haunts and explore new ones-and in so doing rediscover a world he thought he already knew. In Sundown Legends, Checchio offers up the American Southwest as a spiritual repository and source of inspiration. On his travels he talked to individuals whose imaginations...