One wonders if the name recognition John Muir still enjoys as a principal author of our modern ideas of nature has so far outstripped his reputation as an author of actual books that the wilderness icon is destined to be forever more worshipped than read. This would be a shame.

The spiritual father of the national park system and literal founder of the Sierra Club was an irrepressible advocate for the power and value of time spent outside, yes. But anyone who finds communion in those ideas but has never dipped into his still-very-readable, infectiously romantic writings is denying themselves a special pleasure. If ever anyone deserved a Library of America treatment, it must be the nation's most eloquent tramp: his words literally changed the American landscape.

Muir is no exception to the a ongoing reckoning with the complicated legacy of the sainted figures of progressive causes. His work can survive this overdue contextualization, and encountering his thoughtful, ecstatically expressed sentiments on the page is itself a corrective to successive generations of uncritical hagiography. Alongside Thoreau, Leopold and Carson, this is the most essential writing about nature, period. It is also just plain enjoyable. You'll want to take a loaf of crusty bread up to a mountain meadow and read it under a tree.