Wilderness Tales: Forty Stories of the North American Wild

DIANA FUSS is the Louis W. Fairchild Class of ’24 Professor of English at Princeton University, where she has taught courses on fiction, film, poetry, philosophy, and pedagogy. Fuss received her Ph.D. from Brown University. She grew up in Wisconsin and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Introduction

Part 1 SUSPENSE AND TERROR
Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (1835)
Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave” (1853)
N. B. Young Jr., “Swamp Judgment” (1926)

Part 2 WOMEN AND PANTHERS
James Fenimore Cooper, “A Panther Tale” (1823)
Harriet Prescott Spofford, “Circumstance” (1860)
Ambrose Bierce, “The Eyes of the Panther” (1897)
Lauren Groff, “The Midnight Zone” (2016)

Part 3 FIRE AND ICE
Jack London, “To Build a Fire” (1908)
Charles G. D. Roberts, “The Vagrants of the Barren” (1908)
Howard O’Hagan, “Trees Are Lonely Company” (1958)
Wallace Stegner, “The Wolfer” (1959)

Part 4 ACCIDENT AND INJURY
David Quammen, “Walking Out” (1988)
Pam Houston, “Selway” (1992)
Gretel Ehrlich, “Pond Time” (1998)
Annie Proulx, “Testimony of the Donkey” (2008)

Part 5 CATCH AND RELEASE
Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925)
Robert Traver, “The Intruder” (1960)
Melinda Moustakis, “They Find the Drowned” (2011)
Wayne Karlin, “Memorial Days” (2020)

Part 6 HUNTER AND HUNTED
Sarah Orne Jewett, “A White Heron” (1886)
Sigurd Olson, “Trail’s End” (1933)
William Faulkner, “The Old People” (1940)
Anthony Doerr, “The Hunter’s Wife” (2001)

Part 7 MYTH AND MAGIC
L. Frank Baum, “The King of the Polar Bears” (1901)
Ohayohok, “A Human Kayak” (1940)
Jenny Leading Cloud, “ Spotted Eagle and Black Crow” (1967)
Karen Russell, “ St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” (2006)
 
Part 8 PAST AND PRESENT
Marjorie Pickthall, “The Third Generation” (1918)
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, “ The Wind and the Snow of Winter” (1944)
Margaret Atwood, “Death by Landscape” (1989)
Ron Carlson, “Happiness” (2014)

Part 9 ENDANGERMENT AND EXTINCTION
Ray Bradbury, “The Fog Horn” (1951)
T. C. Boyle, “After the Plague” (1999)
Ted Chiang, “The Great Silence” (2015)
Lydia Millet, “Woodland” (2019)

Part 10 CLIMATES AND FUTURES
Juan Rulfo, “Luvina” (1953)
Paolo Bacigalupi, “The Tamarisk Hunter” (2006)
Adrienne maree brown, “the river” (2015)
Tommy Orange, “New Jesus” (2019)

Suggested Further Wilderness Reading
Suggested Further Story Reading
Acknowledgments