Letters from Yellowstone

Description

For readers of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Elizabeth Gilbert‘s The Signature of All Things, and Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl, Diane Smith’s warmhearted and award-winning epistolary novel about a spunky young woman who joins a makeshift field study in Yellowstone National Park at the end of the nineteenth century

“I loved this book in a way that I haven’t loved a book in some time.” –James Welch, author of Fools Crow

In the spring of 1898, A. E. (Alexandria) Bartram–a spirited young woman with a love for botany–is invited to join a field study in Yellowstone National Park. The study’s leader, a mild-mannered professor from Montana, assumes she is a man, and is less than pleased to discover the truth. Once the scientists overcome the shock of having a woman on their team, they forge ahead on a summer of adventure, forming an enlightening web of relationships as they move from Mammoth Hot Springs to a camp high in the backcountry. But as they make their way collecting amid Yellowstone’s beauty, the group is splintered by differing views on science, nature, and economics.

Brimming with humor, excitement, and the romance of the Yellowstone landscape, Letters from Yellowstone is a love letter to the joys of scientific discovery and America’s majestic natural beauty, as well as a thoughtful reflection on environmentalism, Native American displacement, and feminism at the dawn of a new century.
Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Diane Smith
Published: 06/01/2000
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 9780140291810
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 0.70″ H x 7.90″ L x 5.30″ W

About the Author
Diane Smith studied western and environmental history at the University of Montana, and has lived in Montana for most of her life. Her first novel, Letters from Yellowstone, was the winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Fiction Prize and was nominated in the fiction category for the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Book Awards.