Muir was deeply inspired by the vast and, in part, still uncharted continent to which he emigrated with his family from Dunbar at the age of eleven; he spent decades exploring the American wilderness, his pack containing little more than bread, tea, the occasional blanket and the poems of Robert Burns. Impossible to define, he styled himself jokingly as 'a poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist, etc., etc.!' As industrialization and population growth accelerated and the landscape he loved came increasingly under threat, he used his gift for writing to galvanize other environmentalists to rally in its defence. It was largely due to him that the Sierra Club and several National Parks were established in the US in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is Muir's account of his early years in Dunbar and Wisconsin and the beginning of his fondness for 'everything that was wild'; The Mountains of California, The Yosemite and Travels in Alaska describe long expeditions into stunning mountain ranges and valleys, where Muir records native flora and fauna and finds proof of his theories of the effect of glaciation on landscape formation. Also included in this selection are six of his most influential essays. Written with precision and impassioned lyricism, these pages allow us to share the author's astonishment at 'the infinite storm of beauty' that is the natural world, and to appreciate a mind as acutely scientific as it was unashamedly spiritual.