In late-1940s America, few writers commanded attention like Bernard DeVoto. Alongside his brilliant wife and editor, Avis, DeVoto was a firebrand of American liberty, free speech, and public lands. But when a corrupt band of lawmakers, led by Senator Pat McCarran, sought to quietly cede millions of acres of national parks and other western lands to logging, mining, and private industry, the DeVotos entered the fight of their lives. Bernard and Avis built a broad grassroots coalition to sound the alarm—from Julia and Paul Child to Ansel Adams, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Alfred Knopf, Adlai Stevenson, and Wallace Stegner—while the very pillars of American democracy, embodied in free and public access to Western lands, hung in the balance.
In This America of Ours, journalist Nate Schweber uncovers the forgotten story of a progressive alliance that altered the course of twentieth-century history and saved American wilderness—and our country’s most fundamental ideals—from ruin.
Nate Schweber is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times and ProPublica, among many other publications. His recent work for the Times includes investigating sexual abuse within the scholastic athletic communities and a 2016 series about murders in the Bronx that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The Outdoor Writers Association of America awarded him a conservation writing award in 2015. He has also won magazine writing awards from that organization in 2015 and 2018, respectively, for a story about a biologist for the magazine Trout, and a story about prairie conservation for the Anthony Bourdain publication Explore Parts Unknown. He has appeared on Today, CNN, and WNYC. He lives in Brooklyn.
