HOWARTH, William Louis 1940-

PERSONAL: Born November 26, 1940, in Minneapolis, MN; son of Nelson Oliver (an attorney) and Mary (Prindiville) Howarth; married Barbara Ann Brown (a teacher), August 16, 1963 (divorced, 1994); children: Jennifer Lynn, Jeffrey Todd. Education: University of Illinois, B.A. (with honors), 1962; University of Virginia, M.A., 1963, Ph.D., 1967.

ADDRESSES: Home—95 Herrontown Lane, Princeton, NJ 08540. Office—Department of English, McCosh 22, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, instructor, 1966-68, assistant professor, 1968-73, associate professor, 1973-81, professor of English, 1981—. Princeton Environmental Institute, board member and associate faculty; Center for American Places, past chair.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, American Studies Association, Thoreau Society (president, 1975), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Huntington Library fellow, 1968; John E. Annan Bicentennial Preceptor, 1970-73; National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1976-77; awards from Center for the Study of Religion, 1999-2000, and Center for Theology and Natural Science, 2000.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Robert F. Stowell, A Thoreau Gazetteer, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1970.

(Editor) Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1971.

(Compiler, with others) Nature in American Life: A Preliminary Bibliographical Guide; with Supplement, 1971 and 1972, [Princeton, NJ], 1972.

The Literary Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau, Ohio State University Press (Columbus, OH), 1974.

(Editor) The John McPhee Reader, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1976.

(Editor, with Carl F. Hovde and Elizabeth Hall Witherell) Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1978, published as The Illustrated "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," 1983.

(Editor) Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and Other Writings, Modern Library (New York, NY), 1981.

(Author of commentary) Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau in the Mountains, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1982.

The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life As a Writer, Viking (New York, NY), 1982.

(Editor) Henry David Thoreau, Journal 1, 1837-44, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1984.

Traveling the Trans-Canada, National Geographic Society (Washington, DC), 1987.

(Editor) Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, Viking Penguin (New York, NY), 1989.

(Author of commentary) Walking with Thoreau: A Literary Guide to the New England Mountains, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 2001.

Contributor to books, including Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1991; The Changing American Countryside, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), 1995; The Ecocriticism Reader, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1996; Textures of Place, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2001; and Coming into John McPhee Country, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 2003. Editor in chief of "The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau," 1972-80. Contributor of articles and reviews to National Geographic, Smithsonian, Washington Post, and Sewanee Review.

SIDELIGHTS: William Louis Howarth is the author and editor of several books on the life and writings of Henry David Thoreau. He helped to launch the editing of Thoreau's voluminous journal, which spans the years 1837 to 1861. The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life As a Writer is Howarth's critical study of the journal. It details "the themes of Thoreau's life and the evolution of the marvelous journal," according to Clay Jenkinson in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

In what Sierra contributor Henry Middleton described as a determination "to feel Thoreau's life as well as understand it," Howarth walked the same trails, climbed the same mountains, and canoed the same streams as Thoreau once did. In a review of The Book of Concord, however, New Republic contributor Leon Edel suggested that Howarth's attempts to emulate Thoreau's life impair his objectivity. "There is somehow a want of 'distance' from his subject; he is too close, too easily admiring, too defensive." Peter Davison, on the other hand, wrote in the Washington Post Book World: "Howarth climbs inside Thoreau's inkwell and tells us how and why he wrote, to what end, out of what fears and aspirations, and with what circuitous progress toward a 'final' text. It would be hard to imagine a critic's account that more faithfully pursues the mystery of the writing process."

Recently Howarth described himself to CA as "an author and critic of literary nonfiction, chiefly on places, natural history, and geography; and an early founder of ecocriticism, working at the intersection of literary history and evolutionary theory."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 5, 1982, Clay Jenkinson, review of The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life As a Writer.

New Republic, October 18, 1982, Leon Edel, review of The Book of Concord.

New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1982.

Sewanee Review, winter, 1984.

Sierra, January-February, 1983, Henry Middleton, review of The Book of Concord.

Southern Humanities Review, winter, 1985.

Washington Post Book World, November 7, 1982, Peter Davison, review of The Book of Concord.

ONLINE

William Howarth, Professor of English, Princeton University; Associate Faculty, Princeton Environmental Institute,http://www.princeton.edu/~howarth/ (March 8, 2004).