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Lines on the Land Writers, Art, and the National Parks ScottHerring The nineteenth-century photographerWilliam Henry Jackson once complained of the skepticism with which earlydescriptions of Yellowstone were met: the place was too wondrous to be believed. Thepublic demanded proof, and a host of artists and writers obliged. These earlyexplorers possessed a vigorous devotion to the young nation's wilderness -- thenaturalist John Muir famously toured the land from Wisconsin to Florida on foot --and through their work established aesthetic categories that exist to this day. In"Lines on the Land, " Scott Herring contends thatthese writers and artists were canon makers, recognizing the national parks asnaturally occurring works of art and conferring upon them a cultural prestige: theparks were the splendid focal points of the Americanlandscape. These early, canonizing works arehomages to a vast, untouched wilderness. This praise would gradually give way, however, to a distinctly American anger -- what Herring calls "outragedidealism." Later generations were faced with a changing culture that hadimperfectly absorbed, and even misrepresented, the national-park aesthetic. Thepostwar park was overrun by cars and tourists who could not possibly match thepioneering naturalists' profound commitment to and appreciation for theirsurroundings. The collective tone of the parks' chroniclers, as a result, evolvedfrom celebration of awesome beauty to indignation over the perceived corruption ofthe parks, both as an ideal and as actual physicalsettings. Herring traces this shift through thework of a wide spectrum of creative minds, from early figures such as Muir andThomas Moran to later observers of the parks such as Ansel Adams, Sylvia Plath, Edward Abbey, and Rick Bass. The text is punctuated by autobiographical"interchapters," in which Herring relates the book's chief themesto his own experiences in Yellowstone NationalPark. "Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism"