Southwestern Homelands

William Kittredge

Jun 2011 · National Geographic Books

About this ebook

For part of each of the last twenty years, much-loved essayist and fiction writer William Kittredge has ventured to the storied desert landscape of the American Southwest and immersed himself in the region's wide-ranging wonders and idiosyncrasies. Here Kittredge brings all this experience to bear as he takes us on a rewarding tour of the territory that runs from Santa Fe to Yuma, and from the Grand Canyon on south through Phoenix and Tucson to Nogales. It is a region where urban sprawl abuts desert expanse, where Native American pueblos compete for space with agribusiness cotton plantations, and where semi-defunct mining towns slowly give way to new-age hippie gardening and crafts enclaves.

As part-time resident and full-time observer, William Kittredge acquaints us with one of the country's most vital and perpetually evolving regions. Populated with die-hard desert rats on the banks of the Colorado, theoretical physicists in Albuquerque, Hopi mothers and their daughters, and renegade punk-rock kids sleeping in the streets, Southwestern Homelands is a book as much about the legacies of a territory's colorful past as it is about the alternately exciting and daunting complexities of its immediate future.

About the author

William Kittredge has published fiction and essays in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Outside, TriQuarterly, North American Review, and Iowa Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a professor of creative writing at the University of Montana, Kittredge's works include Hole in the Sky: A Memoir, Owning it All: Essays, and the story collections The Van Gogh Fields and We Are Not in This Together.