Desert, Further Studies in Natural Appearances
Author: first_name: John Charles
last_name: van Dyke
Language: English
Year: 1901

<em>The Desert </em>by John Charles Van Dyke, published in 1901, is a lush, poetic description of the natural beauty of the American Southwest. <em>"What land can equal the desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains, and its expanding canopy of sky!" </em>Van Dyke, a cultivated art historian, saw "sublimity" in the desert's "lonely desolation," which previous generations had perceived only as a wasteland, and his book has a conservationist flavor which seems distinctly modern. <em>"The dese