Rick Bass Papers

Novelist, essayist, and short story writer Rick Bass was born March 7, 1958 in Fort Worth, Texas. He was raised in Houston and graduated with a B.S. in Geology from Utah State University in 1979. Employed as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi from 1979 to 1987, Bass has since written full time on environmental issues and the vanishing wilderness. Bass has been an active environmentalist and member of the Sierra Club, Montana Wilderness Association, Cabinet Resources Group, Round River Conservation Studies, and the Yaak Valley Forest Council. He regularly publishes articles in magazines such as Field and Stream, Sports Afield, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Outdoor Life, and others. Bass and his wife Elizabeth moved to Montana’s Yaak Valley in 1987, where Bass finds the isolation he requires to write. Describing Bass’s storytelling voice, Leigh Tillman Partington writes that Bass tells a story “true, strong, and intimate; the details of his language are lush and pure, providing just the right amount of landscape and inner turmoil. Above all, his stories are about precarious balances: between men and women, children and adults, friends, lovers, and between humans and the natural world. His language reflects that balance. Like Eudora Welty, to whom he is often compared, Bass plays close attention to inner and outer surfaces, watching where and how they meet, and he captures those meeting places on the page” (Contemporary Southern Writers, 1999).