Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife

Philip L. Fradkin’s Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife is the third book I have read about

Woodcut, Monument Valley, Everett Ruess

the legendary Ruess, a young man wandering in the American

Southwest in the early 1930s, writing passionate letters to family and friends, keeping a journal with pantheistic leanings, drawing and painting canyons and washes. In 1934 he entered Davis Gulch in Utah and was never seen again.  This is one of three books written about Ruess.  The others can be found here, and here.

Fradkin’s treatment is brisk, factual, and avoids flights of fancy.  He realizes that after Ruess went missing in 1934, and initial searches were made for him, what actually occurred to him will never be known.  The author does go into some of the theories, but comes out, in the end, with the wisest conclusion of Ruess and his life. 

In death, Ruess achieved a kind of legendary immortally he may well have never received had he lived beyond twenty.  His intensity and drive were so bright that, like James Dean, his disappearance

A stretch of Davis Gulch

and presumed death makes painful sense; he may have been done with his mission.  He died as he should have.  Edward Weston, who knew Ruess, summed this on a postcard he wrote Ruess' parents after his disappearance:

"I don't forget Everett - it was kind of you to include me as one of his friends. The way of his going, I feel, is the way I would like to depart - close to the soil. But he was so young."