The Disappearance of Everett Ruess: 5 Questions for Biographer and Historian Philip L. Fradkin

In the early years of the Great Depression, a teenaged boy, an artist in training, wandered away from civilization and headed into desert country that had daunted countless explorers before him. For a few years he wandered the Colorado Plateau, and for a few years reports of Everett Ruess made their way back to the civilized places, along with occasional postcards and drawings from Ruess himself.

And then—well, and then Everett Ruess disappeared, as completely as anyone has ever left this earth.

In 2009, as Encyclopaedia Britannica contributing editor Gregory McNamee reported then, it seemed the mystery of Ruess’s vanishing might have been solved. Apparently not, at least not to everyone’s satisfaction. So Philip Fradkin, a longtime chronicler of the modern American West, details in his new book Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife. McNamee caught up with Fradkin at his home near San Francisco for this conversation.

Britannica: Please tell us a little about Everett Ruess. When did you first become aware of his story, and when did you decide to write a book about him?

Philip Fradkin: Briefly, Everett Ruess wandered the West on foot or burros and horses from 1930 to 1934, wrote of his experiences, produced prints and paintings admired by such artists of the time as Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Maynard Dixon, and then disappeared in late 1934 in the canyonlands of southern Utah, leaving his haunting presence trailing behind him.

I first came across mention of Ruess in Wallace Stegner’s Mormon Country. I then read Everett’s letters and journals and became fascinated with his story. After writing a biography of Stegner, I thought it would be appropriate if I wrote a biography of Ruess, Stegner having lived a full life and Ruess having lived only a partial life, and both having been shaped by the landscapes of the American West....