Shepherds of Pan on the Big Sur-Monterey Coast

About the Book

SHEPHERDS OF PAN ON THE BIG SUR-MONTEREY COAST is a medley of lively, literate essays about the Nature wisdom linking some unlikely bedfellows: Robert Louis Stevenson, Gertrude Atherton, Jack London, Robinson Jeffers, Jaime de Angulo, John Steinbeck, Eric Barker, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and others, with a pertinent postscript on William James, father of American psychology. All these luminaries came to perceive divinity in the awesome, double-dealing power of Nature, symbolized by the Greek god Pan. Many became pantheists, or nature mystics, under the spell of the alternately soft and violent landscape of California´s central coast. The book is a multicolored meditation on a deeply rooted -- and often overlooked -- human need to reconnect with Nature, wellspring of our inner joy and psychic wholeness.

About the Author

ELAYNE WAREING FITZPATRICK (BA English, MS Philosophy) was a city desk reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune; promotion director of KUED, Utah’s public television station; and an associate professor at the University of Utah before relocating in California in 1974 to teach Philosophy and Humanities at Monterey Peninsula College on California’s Big Sur-Monterey coast. She is also a freelance journalist who, after raising a family, began travelling to -- and writing about -- some of the world’s most charming places unspoiled by industrial development. Other books by the author include: A Quixotic Companionship: Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Ethics for Rascals; Doing It with the Cosmos: Henry Miller’s Big Sur Struggle for Love Beyond Sex; Shepherds of Pan on the Big Sur- Monterey Coast; Nature Wisdom: Mystical Writers of the Big Sur-Monterey Coast, a revision and expansion of Shepherds of Pan in color; and an initial edition of this book in black and white. Her features have appeared in numerous periodicals. Web site: www.capricornbrae.com