John Muir lived from 1838 to 1914. During that time he covered most of the American wilderness alone and on foot without a gun, without a sleeping bag, with only a sackful of stale bread and tea. Major credit is ascribed to him for saving the Grand Canyon and Arizona's Petrified Forest. In 1903 he convinced President Theodore Roosevelt, while on a three-day camping trip together, of the importance of a national conservation program. He had been president of the militia Sierra Club since its formation in 1892. Muir's writing, based on journals he kept throughout his life, gives our generation a picture of America only 100 years ago, still wild and unsettled. Edwin Way Teale has preserved the best of Muir's work in selections that show both the ago and the man.
Journey into Summer, first published in 1960, is the third part in naturalist Edwin Way Teale's popular series of four books known as The American Seasons. Following from North With the Spring (1951), the story of a 17,000-mile journey, and Autumn Across America (1956), a 20,000-mile journey from Cape Cod to California, Journey Into Summer takes the reader from northern New England along the shores of the Great Lakes, south through the corn belt, and west to the Rocky Mountains, for a total of 19,000 miles of nature exploration during a typical American summer.
Author Edwin Way Teale (1899-1980) was an American naturalist, photographer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Teale's writings, due to his keen sense of observation, provided a valuable record of environmental conditions across North America. His most famous book series, The American Seasons, documented over 75,000 miles of automobile travel across North America.