References
McFadden, R. D. (2020, December 27). Barry Lopez, Lyrical Writer Who Was Likened to Thoreau, Dies at 75. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/obituaries/barry-lopez-dead.html
explored the kinship of nature and human culture
embraced landscapes and literature with humanitarian, environmental and spiritual sensibilities that some critics likened to those of Thoreau and John Muir.
considered vocations as a priest or a Trappist monk. But, deciding to be a writer, he drifted away from the church
starting in the late 1960s he adopted a deep reverence for nature and its effect upon humanity.
”I can tell you in two words,” he said when asked about his motives for writing. “To help. I am a traditional storyteller. This activity is not about yourself. It’s about culture, and your job is to help."
"Throughout his writings, Lopez returns to the idea that natural landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them. Certain landscape forms, in his vision, possess a spiritual correspondence. The stern curve of a mountain slope, a nest of wet stones on a beach, the bent trunk of a windblown tree: These abstract shapes can call out in us a goodness we might not have known we possessed.”
Mr. Lopez’s fiction reflected his humanist convictions, a blend of adventure, intimacy, ethics and identity.
”Lopez takes readers not only out of themselves to another place, but into themselves as well,"
"He is much attracted to the rift that has opened between human society and nature, and, more specifically, to the theory that art can close it. He believes in the community of artists.”