Letters From Yellowstone:a Novel

Description

For readers of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, and Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl, Diane Smith’s warmhearted and award-winning epistolary novel about a spunky young woman who joins a makeshift field study in Yellowstone National Park at the end of the nineteenth century

“I loved this book in a way that I haven’t loved a book in some time.” —James Welch, author of Fools Crow

In the spring of 1898, A. E. (Alexandria) Bartram—a spirited young woman with a love for botany—is invited to join a field study in Yellowstone National Park. The study’s leader, a mild-mannered professor from Montana, assumes she is a man, and is less than pleased to discover the truth. Once the scientists overcome the shock of having a woman on their team, they forge ahead on a summer of adventure, forming an enlightening web of relationships as they move from Mammoth Hot Springs to a camp high in the backcountry. But as they make their way collecting amid Yellowstone’s beauty, the group is splintered by differing views on science, nature, and economics.

Brimming with humor, excitement, and the romance of the Yellowstone landscape, Letters from Yellowstone is a love letter to the joys of scientific discovery and America’s majestic natural beauty, as well as a thoughtful reflection on environmentalism, Native American displacement, and feminism at the dawn of a new century.

About the Author

Diane Smith has lived most of her adult life and a few years of her childhood in Montana, with only brief interruptions to live in San Francisco and London. She studied western and environmental history at the University of Montana, and now specializes in science writing, with an emphasis on public understanding of science and the reform of science education. She also does some travel writing, which often integrates her interests in history and the environment. In her free time, she visits the national parks, volunteers on archaeological and paleontological digs, explores the back roads of Montana, and tries to learn all she can about the natural history of the West.