Barry Lopez was born in 1945 in Port Chester, New York. He grew up in Southern California and New York City and attended college in the Midwest before moving to Oregon, where he lived from 1968 until his death in 2020. He was an essayist, author, and short-story writer, and traveled extensively in remote and populated parts of the world.
He is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist, for which he received the John Burroughs and Christopher medals; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean, Field Notes, and Resistance. His essays are collected in two books, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life. He contributes regularly to Harper's, Granta, The Georgia Review, Orion, Outside, The Paris Review, Manoa and other publications in the United States and abroad. His work is widely translated and appears in dozens of anthologies, including Best American Essays, Best Spiritual Writing, Best American Magazine Writing, and Best American Non-Required Reading, as well as the “best” collections from National Geographic, Outside, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, and other periodicals.
His most recent books are Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (2006), a reader's dictionary of regional landscape terms, which he edited with Debra Gwartney, and Outside (2015), a collection of six stories with engravings by Barry Moser.
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