I wasn’t familiar with the name Henry Beston before the Library of America featured an excerpt from his The Outermost House (1928) in their monthly newsletter a short while ago. You quite likely aren’t, either; especially if you’re around my age. Although he was well-regarded, even by naturalist writers as esteemed as Rachel Carson and Barry Lopez, he has not penetrated the public consciousness nearly as deeply as they have, which is something of a shame, since he was himself quite crucial to its development despite starting out his writerly career as a press representative during World War I.

His having been forgotten by the masses is partly due to age, as he was of the generation preceding Carson and Loren Eiseley, and partly due to a relative lack of impact – The Outermost House is no policy-shifting Silent Spring, and the book is clearly not as wide-ranging and stylistically supernal as the best of Eiseley.

And yet, while its ambitions are by comparison quite humble, The Outermost House is still rich with insight and chock-full of lyrical descriptions of the environment, bringing to mind the Transcendental predecessor of all American nature books, Walden, as well as later works like A Sand County Almanac and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Beston’s stance, however, differs slightly from Thoreau’s (who also happened to write extensively on Cape Cod) in the sense that while Thoreau’s persona dominates his writing, Beston’s rather recedes, taking on the role of an Everyman Observer-cum-Disciple as opposed to Thoreau’s Mystic Quester-into-Nature. […]