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INTRODUCED BY PAUL KINGSNORTH, Booker-shortlisted author of The Wake

‘I thought that there were two rules in life – never count the cost, and never do anything unless you can do it wholeheartedly. Now is the time to live.’

Artist and wanderer Everett Ruess left home at the age of sixteen to immerse himself in the harsh desert landscapes of the American Southwest. With only his donkeys for company, driven by an insatiable longing for beauty and experience, he ventured ever further from civilisation and into the wilderness of Navajo country.

In 1934, at the age of twenty, he vanished without trace in Utah, a disappearance that remains unsolved to this day. Through letters, diary excerpts and poems – charting not only his rugged adventures and his exquisite nature writing but his progression as a writer, and into adulthood – and with commentary by W. L. Rusho, A Vagabond for Beauty tells his remarkable story.