Ah, the West!

It's the birthday of the naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch, (books by this author) born in Knoxville (1893), who was an English professor at Columbia University and a part-time drama critic for The Nation when he wrote a biography of Henry David Thoreau, and Thoreau's work got him interested in nature writing. So he took a sabbatical from his job and went off to spend a year in the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona. He'd lived most of his adult life in New York City, but upon arriving in the desert he said, "[It] almost seemed I had known and loved it in some previous existence." He wrote a book about it called The Desert Year (1952), and then shocked his friends and colleagues at Columbia when he announced that he was moving to Arizona permanently.
He went on to write many more books about nature and the American West, including The Voice of the Desert (1955) and The Great Chain of Life (1956), and his work had a big influence on the environmentalist movement. Joseph Wood Krutch said, "Both the cockroach and the bird could get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most."