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Rick Bass. Dubbed “Nature Writer” by bookstores and critics, Rick Bass’s works are concerned with the nature of the human heart and the heart of nature. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on March 7, 1958. The son of a geologist, Bass took an early interest in the natural world. He earned a B.S. at Utah State University in 1979 and worked as a petroleum geologist for several years. Bass has lived around the South and Southwest, including stints in Mississippi from 1979 to 1987 as a petroleum geologist in charge of prospecting for new wells, an experience that formed the basis for his book Oil Notes (1989). He currently lives and works in the Yaak Valley in Montana. Bass is part of a recent trend in regional writing: Southerners writing about the West. The stories in Bass’s first short story collection, The Watch, which won the 1988 PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988, are generally set in Texas. His other works, however, concern the West. In an article in the Bloomsbury Review, John Murray wrote, “Bass is characteristically Southwestern in independence, his restlessness, his humor, his vitality, his sunny outlook, his distrust of unchallenged authority, and his disclaim for affectation and pretense.”
Bass published his first novel, Where the Sea Used to Be, in 1998. His most recent fictional work is a short story collection, The Hermit’s Story: Stories (2002). Most of his other recent works have been nonfiction, including The New Wolves (1998), Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism 1999), Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had (2000), and The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Great Wilderness Areas (2002).
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Last updated July 7, 2006.
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