MUIR, JOHN (1838-1914), American naturalist and writer, was born at Dunbar, Scotland, April 21, 1838. His boy life there and on a backwoods farm in Wisconsin is delightfully told in his Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913). Although both places increased Muir's inherent love of nature, he also had marked inventive genius and enjoyed the rush and turmoil of factory and city life. After he left the University of Wisconsin an accident which made him fear his eye was "closed for ever to all God's beauty" caused him to start on the long series of wanderings de scribed in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf ; My First Summer in the Sierra (r9II); The Cruise of the Corwin (1917) and Steep Trails (1918). The huge and spectacular forces of nature attracted him always—the pure air of the upper Yosemite, the majestic sequoia trees of California, the mighty glaciers of Alaska, to one of which his name was given ; and in his letters and finished work he extols them in rhythmical prose. When he first
started his study Muir had no intention of writing; after his marriage, April 14, 1877, to Louie Wanda Strentzel he devoted himself for a number of years to horticulture; at the end of his life he was working hard to put into shape the material he had accumulated, sufficient, he declared, for a dozen volumes. To his efforts are largely due the establishment of the Yosemite and other areas as national parks, and to a certain extent the national conservation policy. Muir died at Los Angeles (Cal.) Dec. 1914.
See Writings (1916-24), a series which includes the Life and Let ters of John Muir by the editor, W. F. Bade, and S. H. Young's Alaska Days with John Muir (1915).