Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife - Hardcover

"The author's research shines through without bogging down the narrative, making it accessible and eminently readable." Library Journal "Enthralling narrative... A riveting ride through one of the Southwest's enduring mysteries." Zyzzyva "Fradkin tries ... to sift through the legends to get to the heart of the genuine person... Tell[s] a gripping tale of a young man consumed by the nature he so desperately loved." Ottawa Citizen "Fradkin tries ... to sift through the legends to get to the heart of the genuine person... Tell[s] a gripping tale of a young man consumed by the nature he so desperately loved." National Post

Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the canyonlands of southern Utah, spawning the myth of a romantic desert wanderer that survives to this day. It was 1934, and Ruess was in the fifth year of a quest to record wilderness beauty in works of art whose value was recognized by such contemporary artists as Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. From his home in Los Angeles, Ruess walked, hitchhiked, and rode burros up the California coast, along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and into the deserts of the Southwest. In the first probing biography of Everett Ruess, acclaimed environmental historian Philip L. Fradkin goes beyond the myth to reveal the realities of Ruess' short life and mysterious death and finds in the artist's astonishing afterlife a lonely hero who persevered.