April-May 1956: Success! The Singing Wilderness is Published, and Makes the New York Times Bestseller List

The Singing Wildernesswas published by Alfred A. Knopf on April 16, 1956. For Sigurd Olson, it was the end of a longtime dream and the beginning of a new phase of life. The narrative below, an excerpt from A Wilderness Within: The Life of Sigurd F. Olson, tells the story of its release and success.

Here's the excerpt:

The Singing Wilderness was published on April 16, 1956, twelve days after Sigurd Olson's fifty-seventh birthday. Publicity began earlier. Olson appeared on television in Minneapolis and St. Paul the evening of April 12, and the next day he signed copies of the book at Dayton's Department store in downtown Minneapolis. The first major review was published on April 15 in Saturday Review. The prominent literary critic Bruce Hutchison wrote:

A day with such a man in the woods must be an education. Even with the abbreviated compass of a book written rather like a casual yarn around the evening campfire, he manages to mix an extraordinary amount of information with a picture of the wilderness whole. For to him it is a whole thing, an organic body of which all life, from the lichen to the man, is interdependent, logical, and in timeless rhythm.

Hutchison established the tone for reviews in many other publications, both large and small. Renowned naturalist Roger Tory Peterson (shown at left) told readers of the New York Herald Tribune Book Review that The Singing Wilderness "is unequivocally the best series of essays on the northwoods country I have ever read." Nationally known outdoor writer Gordon MacQuarrie told Milwaukee Journal readers that Olson's work was an "inspiring book...of Leopold quality." The Christian Science Monitor called the book "as pleasing to the eye and ear as a whitethroat in a full burst of song." The Chicago Sunday Tribune said that while readers may not be able to regularly visit wild places, the "can hear the song of the wilderness in the overtones of such a book as this."

One piece of good news followed another. On May 13, 1956, The Singing Wilderness made the New York Times bestseller list, weighing in at sixteenth place. On May 21, Marie Rodell wrote that nearly forty-four hundred copies of the book had sold, and that Knopf had ordered a second printing. ("All in all, not too bad," Knopf wrote dryly to Rodell on May 22. ) In June The Singing Wilderness made the Philadelphia Inquirer's bestseller list. In July the Lutheran Book Club bought eighteen hundred copies to sell to its members. By year's end Olson's book sold more than six thousand copies, and the American Library Association, saying that The Singing Wilderness made "a signal contribution to the literary world," included it in the group's annual list of notable books.

Congratulatory letters poured in to Ely from friends and family. Fellow Voyageur Eric Morse wrote, "Sig, long have I heard you discourse around the campfire, and spout wisdom from the stern of a canoe--but you have kept your light under that shot-up hat of yours. You are a poet, man!" Wilderness Society Director Olaus Murie wrote that he and his wife read a chapter aloud each night and discussed it. "Sig, it is marvelous," he said. Benton MacKaye, one of the Wilderness Society's founders, wrote that "Never via talk or reading have I heard or seen any such insight on natural harmony as you display." Another of the group's founders, Harvey Broome, joked that Sigurd wrote so well people might see his book as a substitute for the outdoors. The Singing Wilderness, in fact, cemented the Wilderness Society's decision to add Olson to its governing council in 1956. "He has the words and feelings of a poet and deep understanding," said council member George Marshall on April 13. "I am more enthusiastic about him than ever." Sigurd officially joined the council during its annual meeting in August.

After laboring so long under the shadow of his older brother (left), the highly acclaimed dean of Northwestern University's journalism school, Sigurd must have been especially pleased by the letter Kenneth wrote on April 9, 1956: "Brother, I never appreciated how you can write. This is pure prose poetry--the pictures you paint with words. Someday English classes are going to study this as literature. It's better than Thoreau ever did....Brother, am I proud to even know you!" (The competition between them had not quite ended, however. A few years later, after Sigurd had joined Kenneth in Who's Who in America, written several more books and received a number of awards, Kenneth would say, "Well, Sigurd, I guess you're the most famous of us.")

But what must have delighted Olson even more than the letters from friends and family were those that came from people he had never met. "At last," wrote a North Dakota man, "I now have found a modern pen which evokes moods and thoughts that far transcend our mundane day-to-day existence." A woman who left no return address on her letter said that whenever she read bits of The Singing Wilderness, "all of life seems to come into the proper focus again." Kathy Beaumont wrote from California that she and her husband, Hugh (shown at right)--an actor who played Ward Cleaver in the popular television series "Leave it to Beaver"--placed Sigurd's book "with a few special bedside volumes."

Many readers described their personal memories of places where they had heard "the singing wilderness," and many took up the theme voiced by a Maryland man who had been reading the book to his bed-ridden wife: "You have found expression for all the urges that have driven us, all our lives, to take up our packs and search out the far places--feelings beyond our power or expression that have welled up in us as we have camped many places in the wilderness." One of Sigurd's favorites came from a Connecticut book publisher, John Howland Snow, who said he read part of the book "to the accompaniment of the Beethoven Ninth," and added: "Thank you for adding a depth to my horizon, and some comprehension of things which, unlived, otherwise might have remained unknown. Thank you for your enrichment of our symphonic literature."

The letters were the beginning of a steady stream that continued for the rest of Sigurd's life. While most were from people living in the Midwest, they came from all over; an unscientific sample of roughly a hundred written between 1956 and 1961 originated in nearly two dozen states and three Canadian provinces. Sometimes they came from eccentrics, such as the man who said he spoke to spirits and wanted Sigurd to endorse his booklet, "A Personal Testimony to Life After Death." Some of them must have brought a smile to his face for other reasons, as when a young woman wrote as a match-maker for her widowed mother. [Women, in fact, wrote nearly forty percent of the letters in the sample.] Some letters came from prospective writers and artists and conservationists, seeking advice. Some came from people who wanted to know where they should go on their canoe trips, or what they should take. Most, however, simply expressed admiration and gratitude for Olson's writing. He, in turn, made it a practice to answer every letter that came his way; if he was home when one arrived, he nearly always responded within a few days.

Olson had developed his land aesthetic independent of Aldo Leopold's version published in A Sand County Almanac. He had written drafts of many of the essays in The Singing Wilderness a full decade or more before he saw Leopold's book, and some of the key ideas were present in articles of Olson's published in the 1930s and 1940s. Olson's land aesthetic also differed from Leopold's in some important respects. But Olson's writing style was more accessible to a wider audience, and The Singing Wilderness sold at roughly twice the rate of A Sand County Almanac until the mid-1960s. In 1966, Oxford University Press reached an agreement with Ballantine Books to issue an inexpensive paperback edition of A Sand County Almanac (including several essays from another Leopold book, Round River) and sales skyrocketed as the new, more affordable edition made its way into university classrooms and caught the wave of the nation's burgeoning interest in the environment. The Singing Wilderness, however, played an important role in sowing the cultural field that A Sand County Almanac later reaped, for without developing a sense of beauty, joy, connectedness, and wonder there is little motivation to pay heed to, much less live, a land ethic. And the book remained Olson's most popular, with hardcover sales approaching seventy thousand by its fortieth anniversary in 1996. Excerpts were printed in a variety of publications in several languages, including Arabic and Russian; and portions of the book were read on radio and television programs.

On a personal level, the publication and success of The Singing Wilderness was an immensely satisfying culmination of a long and hard-fought dream. For thirty years Sigurd Olson had been obsessed with writing, had felt it was his ordained mission in life, that success was his destiny. The odds often had seemed insurmountable: the kind of writing he was best at and loved most was the kind editors said had no market, and the kind that editors said was marketable was the kind that yielded scathing rejection letters when Sigurd attempted it. He had felt trapped in an unfulfilling career, stuck in a community full of people who couldn't intellectually relate to him, and had sealed off his deepest beliefs, thoughts, and fears from his own family. Succumbing to periods of despair, he had bewildered his wife and damaged his health. He couldn't explain these things. He hadn't wanted to make life hard for Elizabeth or for their children or for himself. His dream went beyond want; it was a fire burning within him, a consuming flame that had the potential to fulfill or destroy him. Somehow, despite the many rejections, despite the self-torture--despite the genuinely long odds of succeeding as a writer of essays--he had held fast to his dream, and had triumphed.

To go back to the table of contents page for items relating to The Singing Wilderness, click here.