Over five decades of travel, author showed our bond with natural world
Barry Lopez, an award- winning writer who tried to tighten the bonds between people and place by describing the landscapes he saw in 50 years of travel, has died. He was 75.
Lopez died in Eugene, Ore., on Christmas after a years- long struggle with prostate cancer, his family said.
Longtime friend Kim Stafford, former Oregon poet laureate, said Lopez’s books “are landmarks that define a region, a time, a cause. He also exemplifies a life of devotion to craft and learning, to being humble in the face of wisdom of all kinds.”
An author of nearly 20 books on natural history studies, along with essay and short story collections, Lopez was awarded the National Book Award for nonf iction in 1986 for “Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape.” It was the result of almost f ive years of traveling the Arctic.
His final work was “Horizon,” an autobiography that recalls a lifetime of travel in more than 70 countries.
Born in 1945 in Port Chester, N. Y., Lopez grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley and, after his mother remarried, New York City.
In “Horizon,” he wrote that in those formative years, he developed “a desire simply to go away. To f ind what the skyline has cordoned off.”
His later years were spent
with his wife, Debra Gwartney, in a wooded area along the McKenzie River east of Eugene.
After years of writing about the natural world and humans’ effect on climate change, he mourned the loss of acres of timber, not to mention personal papers, in September’s Holiday Farm fire.
The wildfire damaged Lopez’s home so badly that he couldn’t live in it. The blaze also destroyed a building that stored his original manuscripts, personal letters, photos and a typewriter he used to write his books.
“Just an incredible body of work and memories,” his stepdaughter Stephanie Woodruff said. “Very meticulously kept and organized. That [ loss] was devastating, certainly. He wrote every single book on a typewriter.”
Lopez is survived by his wife, four stepdaughters and an older brother. A younger brother died in 2017.