Story of My Boyhood and Youth

Before the mountains, there was a boy on a wild Scottish coast. John Muir remembers his childhood in Dunbar and the family's leap to a Wisconsin homestead: hard farm labor, stern discipline, stolen hours of reading before dawn, and the inventions he carved from scrap wood that astonished a state fair. Told late in life with humor and startling honesty, this memoir shows how one of America's great naturalists was forged, not in comfort, but in work, curiosity, and stubborn joy. Hear where the love of wild places began, in Muir's own words.