Rick Bass - 1958
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Hot Springs County High in Wyoming
I. Biography
Rick Bass was born in Texas. He went to college in Utah to major in Petroleum Geology. Rick and his artist wife, Elizabeth, moved to Montana's Yaak Valley. They moved
there from Mississippi, where Rick was an oil and gas geologist. He had fallen in love with the northern Rockies years before, while studying wildlife science at Utah State University.
Rick's studio is a spartan, oneroom log cabin. You won't find a computer or anything that smacks of modern technology. There's a simple wooden desk, uncomfortable looking
chair, heavily laden bookshelves, wood stove, and oil lamp. A wolverine skin is spread out on the only table. Rick does all of his first drafts with pen and paper here during daylight
hours.
Rick Bass lives in the wilderness called the Yaak - a thick forest area northeast of Sandpoint along the IdahoMontanaCanada border. The Yaak offers Bass the solitude to
be a fulltime writer and inspiration to shape both his fictional stories and works that are leading him prominently into new literary territory- that of the conservation writer.
His reputation as a fiction writer has brought critical acclaim. Publishers Weekly called his writing, "complex, compelling, and expressed in a unique and powerful voice." The Chicago Tribune
said his stories show "every hallmark of the natural- that lucid, freeflowering, particularly American talent whose voice we can hear in Twain, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway."
II. Literary Works
Where the Sea Used to Be (1987)
Wild to the Heart (1987)
The Watch (1989)
Oil Notes (1989)
Winter (1991)
Ninemile Wolves (1993)
Platte River (1994)
In the Loyal Mountains (1995)
The Last Grizzlies (1995)
The Book of Yaak (1996)
The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness (1997)
The New Wolves (1998)
This essay was submitted by a student of Kevin Brooke, a teacher at Hot Springs County High in Thermopolis, Wyoming.