Kindred and Related Spirits

Book excerpt: "Jeanne C. Carr was thirty-five years old, wife of a chemistry professor, and a mother of four boys when she first met John Muir in 1860. It was clear to her that Muir, a twenty-two year-old inventor, was a young man of remarkable talents and potential, and by the time he left the University of Wisconsin three years later, a lifelong friendship had been initiated between Carr and Muir." "While Muir's letters to Carr were published in 1915 and have enjoyed an illustrious history, Carr's letters to Muir remained unpublished, and the extent of Carr's influence on her friend over the next three decades, unappreciated. As this researched assemblage of the correspondence attests, Muir's destiny owed no small debt to Carr. She doted on and comforted Muir, offering him understanding and advice in addition to abiding affection. She urged Muir to visit Yosemite where his life's work began, introduced him to influential people, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, and badgered him to publish his work. Their friendship, characterized by an ecstatic spiritual celebration of the natural world, nurtured and sustained Muir from his obscure beginnings as an amateur botanist and continued as he grew into one of the most influential preservationists and natural historians of all time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved