Finding Everett Ruess: The Remarkable Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

In this exhaustive biography, Roberts (No Shortcuts to the Top) retraces the life and disappearance of Everett Ruess in 1934. A young artist and adventurer, Ruess left home in Los Angeles at 16 and spent most of the following four years traveling alone through the remotest regions of the American West. He chronicled his adventures in letters, journals, and watercolors, and soon after he vanished in the backcountry of southern Utah, a legend grew around the handsome and troubled wanderer. Roberts deftly recounts the development of Ruess's celebrity and the controversies that continue to surround the mystery of his death. As a biographer, Roberts faced a difficult task: Ruess was not well-known in his lifetime, and the extensive gaps in his own accounts of his travels are only sparsely supplemented by the testimonies of those he encountered. This lack of evidence added fuel to the legend, and Roberts spends a great deal of time examining theories about Ruess%E2%80%94especially the claim that he was both gay and suicidal. Roberts's thoroughness leads to tedium at times, but his approach captures the complexity of his subject. (July)