Krutch was a New York drama critic and Thoreau scholar who moved to Tucson in his fifties and became one of the great desert writers. This is his naturalist’s year: The spadefoot toad that waits underground for the one right rain, the saguaro and its slow arithmetic, roadrunners, tarantulas, the moth and the yucca that cannot live without each other. He keeps stopping to argue philosophy — against the idea that animals are machines, against a purely economic reading of nature — and does it in prose from a man who wrote for a living for forty years before he got here.
The Voice of the Desert