Whether
the season just isn't in yet or it's too rainy to get out on the water,
settle in with a good classic outdoor story. Keep your zeal for the
outdoors alive with classics from Hemingway and other great outdoor
writers.
For hunters, listening to the accounts of kindred spirits recalling the drama and action that go with good days afield ranks among life’s most pleasurable activities. Here, then, are some of the best hunting tales ever written, stories that sweep from charging elephants in the African bush to mountain goats in the crags of the Rockies, from the gallant bird dogs of the Southern pinelands to the great Western hunts of Theodore Roosevelt.
"Born January 22, 1902, in Arizona Territory, John Woolf O'Connor ultimately became America's most popular outdoor writer. From his first magazine article in 1934, which he sold to Sports Afield for a whopping $12.50, and continuing until just a few weeks before his death in 1978, Jack O'Connor would write nine books on hunting and sporting firearms and more than 1,200 articles for Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, Redbook, True and Esquire. His longest and most treasured magazine association, however, was with Outdoor Life. The Lost Classics of Jack O'Connor features 40 of his best Outdoor Life articles, none of which have ever appeared in any other book."/p>
Told in the third person and only slightly fictionalized, this is the moving, autobiographical, and often humorous story of a middle-aged carpenter, Jim Parker, and his two Brittany gun dogs, Pete and Jake, who, together, make an annual trek to the West and Midwest during the bird-hunting season. It is very much about the relationship between man and dog, about the land they hunt, about the people they encounter, and about the birds they pursue. All of these stories are timeless and beautifully crafted. Similar in tone, quality, and theme to Jim Fergus' highly successful non-fiction work, A Hunter's Road, this book is full of brilliantly descriptive, evocative writing.
Edited by Ernest Hemingway’s grandson Sean, and with an introduction from his son Patrick, Hemingway on Hunting chronicles Hemingway’s zeal for the hunting life, from Africa to the American West. Hemingway found in hunting courage and skill, qualities that he would admire and incorporate into so many other aspects of his life and work.
At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman marks a significant event for John Gierach and his legion of fans. It is his first book of linked essays on a single theme, his first unified book on his favorite topic; the vagaries of the fishing life. Gierach takes readers with him through the year, from his early spring forays out of his house after resisting the temptation to go ice-fishing, to the end of the season in his beloved Rocky Mountains, when the snows begin to pile up and getting to the river is all but impossible.
The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from loss and transforms them into a magnificent twentieth-century classic.
In these fine essays, Tom Davis writes brilliantly and with poignance about gun dogs and gamebirds; about the prairies, fields, and woodlands where they meet; about the delights of upland bird hunting and the dilemmas posed by the summons of blood.
Red Stag is wonderfully atmospheric and exotic, full of rich descriptions of wildlife and the rivers and woods of Normandy. It is beautifully written, near cinematic in its clarity, highly suspenseful, and utterly unforgettable.
There have been few hunters as daring, as powerful, and as articulate as our twenty-sixth president, Theodore Roosevelt. From his ranching years in the Dakota Territory to the famous African adventures, Roosevelt's tales are unparalleled stories of the hunt. The best of them are collected here.
Open up any one of John Gierach's perennially popular fishing tales, and just like that, it's all over. He's got you -- hook, line, and sinker. Sports Illustrated got it right with this comparison: "If Mark Twain were alive and a modern-day fly fisherman, he still would be hard put to top John Gierach in the one-liner department."
