Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects, Barry Lopez in conversation with Julia Martin. Terra Firma Books/Trinity University Press, 2022. 

Lopez had no illusions about the seriousness of our global crisis, yet he also felt a deep conviction about the power of hope and the sources of renewal in the living world. Syntax of the River is an extended conversation spanning three days between Lopez and Julia Martin in which he explores what this juxtaposition means for him as a writer.

Horizon. Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

Horizon is the culmination of four decades of Lopez’s engagement with the worlds’ landscapes, candid analyses of his own history, and dialogues with naturalists, scientists, his readers, and fellow writers. Reflecting on his encounters with six regions of the world—the Pacific Northwest of the United States, the Arctic, the Galápagos Islands, the desert lands of East Africa, Botany Bay in Australia, and the ice shelves of Antarctica—Lopez weaves a series of memories into a philosophical masterpiece that entices the reader into deeper thought about their place on this planet. The overarching theme is our contemporary sense of an impending crisis, which limits our ability to imagine an alternative future. Lopez’s keyword “horizon” seeks to reopen our sense of future possibility through understanding and reimagining the alternatives offered by the many places to which Lopez traveled in the course of his long life. 

Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. With an Introduction by Barry Lopez and black-and-white illustrations by Molly O’Halloran, Trinity University Press 2006; paperback edition, Trinity University Press 2013.

Recognizing the loss not only of American landscapes but of the language used to describe the places instrumental to our national identity, Lopez and Gwartney asked 45 American writers and poets to craft definitions of roughly 900 geographical terms, places close to their hearts, in a collective effort to recover local languages of place being erased by social and economic homogenization. Lopez’s introduction is a meditation on the intimate relationship between American language and literature and the distinct character of American places. Contributors include William deBuys, Gretel Ehrlich, Charles Frazier, Robert Hass, Barbara Kingsolver, William Kittredge, Jon Krakauer, Bill McKibben, Ellen Meloy, Pattiann Rogers, Scott Russell Sanders, Kim Stafford, Arthur Sze, Joy Williams, and Terry Tempest Williams. 

Related, see From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez, edited by Toby Jurovics, with essays by Jurovics, Debra Gwartney and Robert Macfarlane. Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment and Sheldon Museum of Art, 2023. 

Exhibition catalogue featuring fifty American landscape photographers whose work is paired with selections from Home Ground. With images by Robert Adams, Virginia Beahan, Barbara Bosworth, Linda Connor, Terry Evans, Frank Gohlke, Emmet Gowin, Mark Klett, Laura McPhee, Mary Peck, Edward Ranney, Mark Ruwedel, and many others. 

Apologia, with woodcuts by Robin Eschner. University of Georgia Press, 1998.

In 1989 Lopez drove from Oregon to the University of Notre Dame for a semester as a visiting professor. Along the way, he was deeply troubled by the many carcasses of dead animals on America’s roadways; he began a practice of stopping to remove each one from the roadway, a gesture of respect for a life cut short. This slender volume of woodcuts and prose include tributes to raccoons, garter snakes, birds of all kinds, and pronghorn antelope, injecting curiosity, reverence, grief, and responsibility into the place where the natural world and contemporary life collide. 

The Rediscovery of North America. University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

The inaugural Thomas D. Clark Lecture at the University of Kentucky. This reflection on the interplay between people, place, and history reformulates Columbus’s legacy as a self-perpetuating system of annihilation that is evidenced in North America’s desecrated landscapes. His resulting dissatisfaction with living with such a legacy in the country he calls “home” spurs an exploration of the enduring presence of violence and erasure within American social and natural landscapes. As he draws a direct line between the atrocities of Spanish conquistadors and the ongoing pillage of our lands and waters, Lopez calls for the adoption of an ethos that will make further depredations impossible. Doing so, he argues, is a first step toward redemption, which could one day form the basis for non-Native people to make legitimate claims to North America as “home.” 

Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986.

This bestselling exploration of the Far North was recognized with the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1986. In his groundbreaking classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing, Lopez explores the wonders of the perilous Far North, registering the sensations of standing in its strangely stunted forests, beneath the aurora borealis, and looking out onto vastness of its frozen seas. His keen observations of Musk oxen, polar bears, narwhal, and other wildlife provide points of orientation toward life in this place, and toward what it means to be a living being in the late twentieth century. He finds in his fellow humans, from the generations of indigenous peoples and the odd foreign explorers who mostly fell to their doom, the logic to his own drive to move further into these places of otherworldly beauty and perilous enchantment. It is the landscape, he asserts, that shapes the imagination and forges our desires, no matter where on Planet Earth any one of us may find ourselves.

Of Wolves and Men. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978.

Lopez’s careful study, a finalist for the National Book award, draws upon an impressive array of literature, history, science, and mythology along with his extensive experience with captive and free-ranging wolves to explore the interaction between this endangered species and human civilizations over the centuries. Instead of making the scientific or moral case for the protection of wolves, Lopez immerses the reader in their sensory worlds. This multi-perspectival view accounts for various ways that humans see wolves, from biologists who view them through data to Inuit hunters who view them as kindred in providing for families. Lopez emphasizes the ultimate unknowability of the minds and lives of wolves, a sensibility based on his own experience raising two wild red wolves. An important catalyst to the emerging field of animality studies, Lopez expands readers’ range ethical choices about how to engage with wolves, and other wildlife, today.

Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. Random House, 2022.

This remarkable collection of essays, some written in the months before Lopez’s death, forms a fitting capstone to his legacy. Unspooling the tightly interwoven threads of the personal and political that have made Lopez a distinctive voice in the American conversation, he recalls indigenous elders and scientific mentors not as sources of information or figures within his stories, but as teachers who sharpened his eye so he could see the natural world for himself and for his readers. Lopez’s stories of an American childhood in New York City and Los Angeles evoke tenderness and nostalgia as well as shattering personal pain. Lopez gives readers the epilogue of his travels across the world in his poignant meditations on his return to his place of sanctuary, his home along the McKenzie River in Oregon. These cycles of travel and return harmonize with Lopez’s meditations on cycles of life and death: his own, and those he sees across a planet in peril. 

About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

A collection of Lopez’s most significant travel and nonfiction essays together with several new works of memoir, including, “A Voice,” his first venture into autobiography. This deeply personal travelogue provides a wealth of insights into human attitudes and alignments with the planet. Essays from his travels off the tourists’ beaten paths through Hokkaido, the Galápagos, Bonaire, and points in between weave moments from Lopez’s past into his presence in these remote places. Their histories, vibrancy, dispossession, and enduring wonders put Lopez nearer the divine and closer to existential questions about how the peoples of the world relate to the lands they inhabit. This volume includes the landmark essays, “The American Geographies” and “Learning to See.” About This Life is a crucial mark in the work of Barry Lopez and is considered essential reading for those who seek to understand his sense of purpose as a thinker, traveler, and writer. 

Crossing Open Ground. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988.

A collection of Lopez’s most significant shorter nonfiction works to date, published in the wake of the phenomenal success of Arctic Dreams. We find Lopez calling attention to endangered wildlife, cultural  erasures, and inhuman brutality, as well as the joy of discovering our ties to place through travel across luminous landscapes. Its varied critical essays include “Landscape and Narrative,” “A Presentation of Whales,” and “The Passing Wisdom of Birds.” Rejecting despair or disengagement, the pieces in this collection urge readers to seek re-enchantment with the natural world and reclaim our sense of place within it, which, Lopez argues, is both fundamental to our well-being as humans and, critically, essential to our survival on earth.

Outside, with engravings by Barry Moser. Trinity University Press, 2014.

Lopez renders the six stories in Outside in spare prose that conveys a reverence for the both the exterior and interior landscapes in which its characters live. Each surfaces insights into the relationships between humans and animals, creativity, and beauty, and, ultimately, life and death. Lopez‘s portrayals of people in elemental and sacred places attend to the wonderous dimensions of the human experience. 

Resistance, with monoprints by Alan Magee. Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

The aftermath of 9/11, which included the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, turned Lopez toward several years of political protest. In Resistance, the nine members of a community of artists designated as a terrorist cell each tell their stories before disappearing off the grid. Rather than centering on the repressive effects of state power, its philosophical core makes Resistance a critical reflection on many of the most pressing questions of the early twenty-first century.

Light Action in the Caribbean. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

Several years of therapy in the late 1990s turned Lopez’s mind to the nature and consequences of violence, here confronted in a collection of short fictions exploring the darker side of human nature and the possibilities, if any, for redemption. This book of stories is populated with characters whose ostensibly immutable social positions are turned upside down, both by circumstance, and by their proclivities to act outside the bounds of their prescribed social roles. The title story plunges readers into a Conradian heart of darkness where saints transgress, sinners lead a life of the spirit, and nightmares unfold within the sort of paradisical landscape that tourists’ dreams are made of, suggesting that landscapes, like people, are also subject to dramatic and unsettling reversals.

 Lessons from the Wolverine, with illustrations by Tom Pohrt. University of Georgia Press, 1997.

An illustrated reprinting of one of the stories from Field Notes. Set within vivid descriptions of the Alaska wilderness and infused with elements of magical realism, Lopez shows how one man, by adopting the perspective of the animals, comes to understand his place in the natural world. Tom Pohrt’s watercolors bring vivid dimension to this story of seeing, sensing, and knowing. Lessons from the Wolverine brings minute detail to the narrator’s process of discovery, encouraging deeper consideration of both human and other-than-human sources of wisdom. 

Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

This culmination of the Notes series presents a new collection of short fictions in the vein of Winter Count. Each of the protagonists in these spare, haunting fictions, grapples with an experience that is profound, unsettling, and oddly liberating. These the stories form a call to compassion for the human predicament and for hope in the alternatives that arise from attentiveness to the contradictions embedded in our own selves.

Crow and Weasel, with illustrations by Tom Pohrt. North Point Press, 1990.

This fable for all ages, adapted as a stage play performed in children’s theaters across the U.S., follows two young animal-people, Crow and Weasel, as they make their first journeys away from home. As their journey takes both enchanted and perilous turns, Crow and Weasel help each other navigate the unfamiliar, face their worst fears, and understand their relationship to the land that they walk on. 

Vintage Lopez. Vintage Books, 2004. 

This anthology of key works by Barry Lopez, includes both fiction and non-fiction stories and essays.

Winter Count. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981.

Indigenous people on the Plains used pictographic calendars, called winter counts, to mark events, both ordinary and remarkable, to chart the passage of time and the streams of tribal histories. The stories that Lopez assembles in his Winter Count chart changes in relationships over time between humans and nature. The blue herons navigating a snowstorm to light on the streets of New York City, the fantastical herd of buffalo singing of death, and the Nebraska river that disappears without explanation provide portals to thinking about our own past, present, and future relationships with the land. 

River Notes: The Dance of Herons. Andrews and McMeel, 1979.

This companion volume to Desert Notes, written in the wake of the death of Lopez’s mother, evokes grief and healing through the life of the river and the living beings who dwell along its shores. In dreamlike prose drawing comparisons to Jorge Luis Borges, Lopez trains his focus on the qualities of a river that reforge the links between humans and the natural world. Within this seemingly narrow scope, Lopez reveals the forces, settings, rituals, movements, and imperatives of a river, rendered in what has been described as “a prose poem,” “a prayer,” and “a love song to a mountain river.” 

Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America. Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1978.

In many indigenous cultures Coyote is a being whose numerous manifestations redirect flows of power and shift everyone’s perceptions, including his own. Lopez collected sixty-eight tales from forty-two tribes to explore a range of understandings of the creation of the terrain that came to be “North America,” each story containing a lesson from Coyote that has conveyed history over generations and points toward ethical, abundant futures. 

Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven. Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1976. With photographs by Barry Lopez. 

These experimental short fictions meditate on the mind-altering qualities of desert isolation, with a nod to Thomas Merton’s Wisdom of the Desert. Lopez walks his readers through desert landscapes in this collection of memories, dreams, and stories about finding one’s place within a terrain of overwhelming peril and enchantment. 

“An Era of Emergencies is Upon Us and We Cannot Look Away,” in Sandra Phillips, American Geography: Photographs of Land use from 1840 to the Present. Radius Books, 2021.

A searing indictment of our treatment of the land, and a plea to work toward a more sustainable relationship with the planet. 

“A True Naturalist,” Foreword in Hank Lentfer, Raven’s Witness: The Alaska Life of Richard K. Nelson. Mountaineers Books, 2020. 

An account of his friendship with and admiration for “Nels,” with whom he shared a deep connection to the land and its animal inhabitants. 

“Introduction,” in Ben Huff, The Last Road North. Kehrer, 2014. 

A remembrance of Lopez’s time in Alaska, and an appreciation of Huff’s photographs along the Haul Road and the complexities and failings of our relationship to this hybrid landscape of wilderness and industry. 

“Introduction,” in Stephen Bogener and William Tydeman, eds. Llano Estacado: An Island in the Sky. Texas Tech University Press, 2011.

A collection of artists and photographers gathered in tribute to this unique southwestern landscape and its cultures.  

The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion, selected and introduced by Barry Lopez. Milkweed Editions, 2007.

“Out West,” in Emily Neff, The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950. Yale University Press, 2006. 

This exhibition catalogue explores the history of modernism in American art against the backdrop of the American West, opening with Lopez’s examination of how artists have navigated the West’s open spaces, set against a history of violence towards its indigenous inhabitants. 

“Love in a Time of Terror.” Foreword to Earthly Love: Stories of Intimacy and Devotion from Orion Orion Magazine, 2020: xi-xx. 

Lopez’s memories of living with Australia’s Warlpiri people lead to a reflection on what love means in a difficult and unforgiving land that culminates with his exhortation to “embrace fearlessly the burning world,” words which become the title to his last book of collected essays, published posthumously.

“Sliver of Sky: Confronting the Trauma of Sexual Abuse.” Harper’s (January 2013): 41-48. 

Lopez’s detailed recounting of his experience with childhood sexual abuse and his lifelong efforts to deal with the consequences of such severe and prolonged trauma. 

“A Dark Light in the West: Racism and Reconciliation.” The Georgia Review 64.3 (Fall 2010): 365-86. 

Lopez’s theme of reconciliation continues in this searching examination of the history of racism in Oregon.

“¡Nunca Mas!” Mānoa 20.1 (Summer 2008): vii-xii. 

Lopez, while visiting Auschwitz, confronts the depth of human evil and our refusal to acknowledge our complicity in it. Published as the Prologue to Gates of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination, a special issue of Mānoa which Lopez edited. 

“A Scary Abundance of Water.” Los Angeles Weekly (January 11-17, 2002): 26-29, 31-34. 

Lopez’s memoir of growing up in Southern California during the transition from agriculture to suburban housing; nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and chosen as a Notable Essay, The Best American Essays 2003.

“Before the Temple of Fire.” Harper’s (January 1998): 35-50. 

Lopez’s portrait of the arts community drawn together by Richard Rowland’s Dragon Kiln, in Astoria, Oregon, as the various artists, including Lopez, face the destructive force of fire during the process of creation. Reprinted as “Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire” in About This Life.

“Offshore: A Journey to the Weddell Sea.” Orion 13.1 (Winter 1994): 48-65. 

A novella-length essay detailing Lopez’s journey to Antarctica’s Weddell Sea aboard the scientific research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, with Conradian overtones.

“Replacing Memory.” Georgia Review 47.1 (Spring 1993): 23-38. 

An award-winning multipart essay that broke ground on Lopez’s approach to writing memoir.

“Our Frail Planet in Cold, Clear View.” Harper’s (May 1989): 43-49. 

This account of Lopez’s second scientific expedition to Antarctica reveals the specter of climate change.

“Landscapes Open and Closed.” Harper’s (July 1987): 51-58. 

An idyllic safari in the South African savannah clashes with the brutal reality of apartheid in Johannesburg, raising difficult questions that will alter Lopez’s definition of nature writing and shape his vision in Horizon.

“California Desert: A Worldly Wilderness.” National Geographic 171.1 (January 1987): 42-77.

 A portrait of the Sonora and Mojave deserts, written in tandem with Arctic Dreams.

“The Passing Wisdom of Birds.” Orion 4.4 (Autumn 1985): 15-21.

 Lopez’s expression of raw horror at the violence of Hernan Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, suggesting how this founding act might be transcended today. Precursor to The Rediscovery of North America. Notably, Lopez’s family name was directly descended from one of Cortés’s key strategists.

“Story at Anaktuvuk Pass.” Harper’s (December 1984): 49-52. 

Reprinted in Crossing Open Ground and elsewhere as “Landscape and Narrative.” Lopez’s essential statement of his philosophy, showing the interrelationship of life, landscape, and literature.

“Renegotiating the Contracts.” Parabola 8.2 (May 1983): 14-19. 

Lopez’s first major essay, often reprinted, on the ethics of human/animal relations. (Errors were introduced in production; a corrected version appears in Thomas J. Lyon’s This Incomparable Land [1989].)

“A Faint Light on the Northern Edge.” North American Review 267.1 (March 1982): 12-21. 

An essay on hunting walrus with traditional Eskimo on St. Lawrence Island, which examines the fate of local animals and native cultures in the wake of federal legislation, becomes an ethical inquiry into slow violence.

“A Presentation of Whales.” Harper’s (March 1980): 68-79. 

Working as a journalist, Lopez covers the historic beaching of 41 sperm whales on the Oregon coast. A wrenching essay on the human inability to comprehend or control overwhelming natural forces.

“The American Indian Mind.” Quest/78 (September-October 1978): 109-24. 

A wide-ranging sixteen-page special section on Native American philosophy edited by Barry Lopez

“Faces of Where We Have Been.” North American Review 259.1 (Spring 1974): 3-7. 

Lopez’s first major travel essay, tracing his cross-country drive from Oregon to Florida, where he views the launch of Apollo 17, America’s last trip to the surface of the moon.

“Weekend.” Audubon 75.4 (July 1973): 62-67. 

Lopez’s first large-scale essay on an environmental theme, recounting a disillusioning weekend in the Oregon desert where Lopez observes the callous carelessness of American families on vacation.

“A Walk in the Woods.” Outdoor World 4.2 (September-October 1971): 8-15. 

Lopez’s first published nature essay.

Kurt Caswell and James Perrin Warren, eds., Going to See: 30 Writers on Nature, Inspiration, and the World of Barry Lopez. Mountaineers Books, 2024.

Matthew Cheney, About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community. Punctum Books, 2023. 

James Perrin Warren, Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists. The University of Arizona Press, 2015.

William E. Tydeman, Conversations with Barry Lopez: Walking the Path of Imagination. University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. 

Mike Newell, No Bottom: In Conversation with Barry Lopez. XOXOX, 2007.

Mark Tredinnick, The Land’s Wild Music: Encounters with Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin. Trinity University Press, 2005.