Long hailed as a classic of American nature writing, Henry Beston’s eloquent chronicle of a solitary year spent on a Cape Cod beach was written in longhand at the kitchen table, in a little room overlooking the North Atlantic and the dunes. In 1926 Beston retreated to the outer beach at Eastham in search of peace and solitude. What began as a two-week stay lengthened into a year spent keenly observing the rhythm of the seasons and life on the Great Beach. The Outermost House played a part in establishing the Cape Code National Seashore and has profoundly influenced subsequent nature writers, including Rachel Carson, Joseph Wood Krutch, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez. This Warbler Classics edition includes an essay by Allan Burns on the art and legacy of The Outermost House as well as a detailed biographical timeline.
Henry Beston (1888–1968) was an American writer and naturalist, best known as the author of The Outermost House (1928). He also wrote Herbs and The Earth (1935), The St. Lawrence (1942), Northern Farm: A Chronicle of Maine (1948), and several books for children.
Allan Burns earned a Ph.D. in English literature at Penn State University and taught at university level for a number of years before moving into the nonprofit sector. He has edited many books, including Phoebe Snetsinger’s Birding on Borrowed Time (2003) and three major anthologies of haiku: Montage (2010), Haiku in English (2013), and Where the River Goes (2013). His own collections of haiku include Distant Virga (2011) and Earthlings (2015), and he has published many articles and reviews. A longtime vegan and animal rights activist, he works as a senior editor for the Foundation to Support Animal Protection and lives in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
—from the book
Pages: 136 pages
Book dimensions: 6 x .34 x 9 inches
Published: January 1, 2024
978-1-962572-29-3 (paperback)
978-1-962572-30-9 (ebook)
