Introduction
Barry Holstun Lopez (born January 6, 1945) is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist.
Biography
Lopez was born in Port Chester, New York and raised in Southern California and New York City. He attended the University of Notre Dame, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees there in 1966 and 1968. He also attended New York University and the University of Oregon. His essays, short stories, reviews and opinion pieces began appearing in 1966. Until 1981, he was also a landscape photographer. He regularly collaborates with other artists and writers and is active in national and international efforts toward reconciliation. He has traveled to nearly 80 countries and in 2002 was elected a Fellow of the Explorers Club.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity. He has written introductions for and guest edited a number of books and anthologies, including Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, with Debra Gwartney, The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, and The Future of Nature. In 2008, he guest edited two volumes of the journal Manoa with Frank Stewart, Maps of Reconciliation and Gates of Reconciliation. Lopez along with Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin, was hailed in Mark Tredinnick's The Land's Wild Music (Trinity University Press, 2005) in which Tredinnick analyzed how the landscape nourished and developed Lopez's writing.
An archive of Lopez's manuscripts and other work has been established at Texas Tech University, where he is the university's Visiting Distinguished Scholar.
Lopez lives near Finn Rock on the McKenzie River in western Oregon.
Awards
- National Book Award
- Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters
- Lannan Literary Award
- Guggenheim Fellowship
- John Burroughs Medal
- John Hay Medal
- Three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Awards
- Two Oregon Book Awards
- Two Pushcart Prizes
- Two Christopher Medals
- PEN Syndicated Fiction Award
- Five National Science Foundation Antarctica Fellowships
- New York Public Library Literary Lion Award
- Lannan Residency Fellowship
- MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship
- Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Award
- Oregon Governor's Award
- Lifetime Achievement Award, [Oregon] Literary Arts
- Elected Fellow of the Explorers Club