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John Muir Writings

• Quotations and Meditations
• Selected Passages
• Articles
• Books
• John Muir Exhibit

Quotations and Meditations

• Favorite Quotations - selected by Harold Wood, of the John Muir Exhibit
• "Damming Hetch Hetchy" , excerpt from Muir’s Unpublished Journals, c. 1913
• "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)

Selected Passages by John Muir

• "The Calypso Borealis" excerpted from The Life and Letters of John Muir - Muir’s moving account of his long search for, and final discovery of a rare woodland flower. This was his first published writing
• "The Earthquake" , from Our National Parks (1901) - Muir revels in an earthquake in Yosemite, just as he does any other storm!
• "Mount Ritter" from The Mountains of California (1894) - A mountain-climbing classic
• The Water-Ouzel , Chapter 13 of The Mountains of California (1894). - One of the finest animal biographies ever written
• "Wild Wool" from Steep Trails (1918) - Muir’s reflections on why animals are not made "for man."
• A Wind Storm in the Forests - Chapter 10 of The Mountains of California by John Muir (1894). - Muir’s exciting adventure atop a Douglas fir during a wind-storm
• Letters to botanist Sir Joseph Hooker - from Kew Gardens Archives
• Letters to Family - two unpublished fragments from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin archives

Articles by John Muir

• "American Forests" , Atlantic Monthly , No. 80, 1897 August. (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
• A Letter from John Muir to S. Hall Young, May 31, 1910
• Mount Shasta and John Muir , his writings from the Mount Shasta Collection at College of the Siskiyous Library:
  • Modoc Memories (1874)
  • Notes from Shasta (1877)
  • Salmon Breeding (1874)
  • Shasta Bees (1874)
  • Shasta Game (1874)
  • Shasta in Winter (1874)
  • Snow-Storm on Mt. Shasta (1877)
• "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

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
  • "Stickeen: An Adventure with a Dog and a Glacier" — the 1915 (shorter) version
  • "Stickeen: The Story of a Dog" — the 1909 (longer) version, with annotations
• My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)
  • As first published in the The Atlantic Monthly in 1911.
• Edward Henry Harriman (1911)
• The Yosemite (1912) The complete text of this book arranged by chapter
• The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913)
• The Life and Letters of John Muir by William Frederic Badè (1924) - The full text of this two-volume book contains thousands of Muir’s letters and previously unpublished writings, along with Badè’s biography.
• Letters to a Friend (1915)
• Travels in Alaska (1915)
• A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) The complete text of this book arranged by chapter
• The Cruise of the Corwin (1917)
• Steep Trails (1919)
• John of the Mountains (1938) letters edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe. Will be posted online when it enters the public domain in 2034.

John Muir Exhibit

For further information on on the life of John Muir, please see the Sierra Club’s John Muir Exhibit, created by Harold Wood and others For further historical books and photographs on Yosemite, See the Yosemite History webpage.

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