OCR Text |
Show 539. But his musings on h i s l i f e were, he thought, personal and private. While he v i s i t e d many of the scenes of his youth during the n i n e t i e s , those journeys into his past did not at the time seem so important as the pressing issues of the present. He always knew t h a t the world which had allowed him to evolve was far more important than any one man. By the turn of the century, his two e d i t o r s , Walter Hines Page of Atlantic, and Robert Underwood Johnson of Century, both encouraged him t o begin an autobiography- Johnson suggested in 1899 that he might use a "thread of biography" and "string upon i t your observations of l i f e , the awakening of a scientific spirit, and the c o n t r a s t between boyhood and manhood." In 1900, Muir told Page t h a t he planned to write at least six volumes, f i r s t a Yosemite Guidebook for Johnson, second a "California t r e e and shrub book," t h i r d a mountaineering book "all about walking, climbing, and camping, with a l o t of illustrative excursions," fourth a book on Alaska, and fifth "a book of Studies . . . my main r e a l book in which I ' l l ask my readers to c e r e b r a t e . " Only l a s t on t h i s ambitious l i st did he mention the autobiography which so many people were asking for. It hardly seemed worthwhile "in the midst of so much that is i n f i n i t e l y more important," though "such a book would offer f a i r opportunities here and there to say a word for God." Though he completed The Yosemite and Trayels^njU-aska before he died, autobiography proved to be his most important task in the twentieth century, and most of that was done |