A REFERENCE LIST TO JOHN MUIR'S NEWSPAPER 



ARTICLES 



By Cornelius Beach Bradley 



Newspaper articles have no proper place in a bibliography. 

 If noticed at all, they must appear as addenda or as postscript 

 — as they do here. Yet Mr. Muir's letters are of much more 

 than ordinary interest, not merely in themselves as immediate 

 memoranda of vivid experience and kindled feeling on the part 

 of a gifted personality, btit also for the role they played in the 

 development of the writer's powers. So far as he continued the 

 practice of writing them, they were the first drafts of chapters 

 in his later books — the fresh-quarried ore which, in his brood- 

 ing mind, through the long years was slowly transmuted into 

 the fine gold of his finished work. 



In Mr. Muir's case, indeed, the process began long before he 

 became a newspaper correspondent. We see it in his Letters to 

 a Friend — now happily accessible — portions of which are found 

 to have been transferred almost verbatim into subsequent pub- 

 lications. And the material of his very latest work. Travels in 

 Alaska, published since his death, first saw the light thirty-six 

 years ago in the shape of three series of letters to the San Fran- 

 cisco Bulletin. 



Nearly all these newspaper letters are grouped in distinct se- 

 ries, each series being the record of a season's explorations or 

 quest. The serial letters began with a group of three Yosemite 

 studies in 1871-1872, and were concluded eighteen years later 

 in another group of three written from the same beloved valley. 



The stream of Mr. Muir's writing of this sort rose steadily 

 for ten years to its flood-tide in 1881, in the famous series of 

 twenty-one letters written during the cruise of the ''Corwin" in 

 search of the "Jeanette." Then it suddenly ebbed. After that 

 there was one letter in 1885, three — already mentioned — in 

 1889, and one more in 1897. There ends Mr. Muir's list. There 

 were probably a few more written later, but they were no long- 

 er an organic feature of his literary work. 



