The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, John Muir

While we remain cooped up in our homes, gasping at fresh air once a day and thinking wistfully back to days in the mountains and meadows, forests and friend’s gardens, let us live vicariously through an eleven year old John Muir describing what it was like to run free among the luscious landscape of his new home, the Wisconsin wilderness - “boundless woods full of mysterious good things”. 

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, John Muir’s autobiography, tells tales of his childhood playing in the rockpools of Dunbar, his family’s move to America at age 11 and his life at University. In Muir’s iridescent prose, the kind of writing that can literally change the landscape of a country, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is an enlightening insight to Muir’s remarkable childhood, full of challenges as it was joy, and how John Muir made his way from ploughboy to ‘Father of the National Parks’.

John Muir’s work as a naturalist, author and environmentalist led to the foundation of the General Grant, Sequoia and Yosemite national parks in the United States. In his birthplace of Scotland, and across the UK, his legacy is carried on by The John Muir Trust, a charity dedicated to the experience, protection and repair of wild places (and recent host of The Nature Library at their visitor centre in Pitlochry).