Barry Holstun Lopez (1945 – )
American environmental writer

Barry Lopez has often called his own nonfiction writing natural history, and he is often categorized as a nature writer. This partially describes his work, but limiting him to that category is misleading, partly because his work transcends the kinds of subjects implicit in that classification. He could as well, for example, be called a travel writer, though that label also does not completely describe his work. He has in addition published a number of unusual works of fiction, and even has one children's book (on Crow and Weasel ) to his credit.

Barry Lopez was born in Port Chester, New York, but he spent several early childhood years in rural southern California and, at the age of 10, returned to the East to grow up in New York City. He earned a BA degree from the University of Notre Dame, followed by an MAT from the University of Oregon in 1968. His initial goal was to teach, but in the late 1960s he set out to become a professional writer and since 1970 has earned his living writing (as well as by lecturing and giving readings).

Lopez's nonfiction writing transcends the category of natural history because his real topic, as Rueckert suggests, is the search for human relationships with nature, relationships that are "dignified and honorable." Natural history as a category of literature implies a focus on primeval nature undisturbed by human activity, or at least on nature as it exists in its own right rather than as humans relate to it. He is a practitioner of what some have called "the new naturalism—a search for the human as mirrored in nature." Lopez's focus then is human ecology , the interactions of human beings with the world around them, especially the natural world. Even his most "natural" book of natural history, Of Wolves and Men, is not just about the natural history of wolves but about how that species' existence or "being" in the wild is affected by human perceptions and actions, and it is as well about the image of the wolf in human minds.

His fiction works can be called unusual, partly because they are often presented as brief notes or sketches, and partly because they are frequently blended into and combined with legends, factual observations of nature, and personal meditations. Everything Lopez writes, however, is in the form of a story, whether fiction, natural history, folklore, or travel writing. His story-telling makes all of his writing enjoyable to read, easy to access and ingest, and often memorable.

Lopez as a story teller, occupies the spaces between truth-teller and mystic, between natural scientist and folklorist. He has written of wolves and humans, and then of people with blue skins who could not speak and, apparently, subsisted only on clean air. He writes of the land in reality and the land in our imaginations, frequently in the same text. His writings on natural history provide the reader with great detail about the places in the world he describes, but his fiction can force the shock of recognition of places in the mind. In 1998, Lopez was a National Magazine Award in Fiction finalist for The Letters of Heaven and in 1999 he received the Lannan residency fellowship.

Barry Lopez is in part a naturalist, in the best sense of that word. He is also something of an anthropologist. He is a student of folklore and mythology. He travels widely, but he studies his own home place and local environment intently. And, of course, he is a writer.

[Gerald L. Young Ph.D. ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Lopez, Barry. About this Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory. Random, 1998.

——. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. New York: Scribner, 1986.

——. Crossing Open Ground. New York: Scribner, 1988.

——. Desert Notes; Reflections in the Eye of a Raven. Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews & McMeel.

——. Lessons from the Wolverine. Illustrated by Tom Pohrt. University of Georgia Press, 1997.

——. Light Action in the Caribbean. Knopf, 2000.

Rueckert, W. H. "Barry Lopez and the Search for a Dignified and Honorable Relationship With Nature." In Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers. Ed. J. Cooley. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

PERIODICALS

Paul, S. "Barry Lopez." Hewing to Experience: Essays and Reviews on Recent American Poetry and Poetics, Nature and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989.