LITERARY CRITICS have put Rick Bass '79 on the same pedestal as Eudora Welty, Tom McGuane and D.H. Lawrence. Twenty-one mesmerizing books in 20 years, written in longhand and transcribed by a hired typist. His short stories and novellas have received the most critical acclaim (Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Award, sixl appearances in Best American Short Stories), but in the 1990s, his art took a back seat to wilderness advocacy, and the personal essay became his preferred form. His newest book, The Diezmo, stakes a bold new claim, invading the territory of the masterful Cormac McCarthy. The Diezmo is Bass' first historical novel, a fictional retelling of the 1842 border patrol that paid back the Mexicans for the Alamo.

The settings of Bass' stories span the geography of his life - childhood in freewheeling Texas, college in Mormon Utah, his romance with oil prospecting in Mississippi, the adoption of a permanent home at age 29 in Montana's Yaak River Valley, where he lives with wife Elizabeth Hughes, a Mississippi artist, and two daughters in a solar-powered log cabin with no running water.

His backwoods lifestyle in extreme northwestern Montana, shoveling snow, chopping wood for the stove, providing venison for the family infuses his prose with a transcendental Thoreauian spirituality - "wilderness as a source of communion and salvation," as one literary scholar put it. "I sometimes believe that this valley - so high up in the mountains and in such heavy woods - is like a step up to heaven, the last place you go before the real thing," Bass wrote in his 1991 memoir, Winter: Notes from Montana.

"His men get high on lots of things, but the intoxicant of choice is the high country," a Chicago Tribune book reviewer wrote of The Watch, Bass' first short story collection.

"His men get high on lots of things, but the intoxicant of choice is the high country," a Chicago Tribune book reviewer wrote of The Watch, Bass' first short story collection.

Bass takes his readers "down into where the feeling of primal connection is and simultaneously out to the mind-body's living partners and peers, the trees, the trout, the running river, the hills," USU mentor Tom Lyon wrote.

The message is subversive, the Tribune reporter noted, a "rebellion against all the paltry but overpowering forces in modern America that combine to squeeze the sweetness out of life. His protagonists are the last cowboys, Huck Finns who lit out for what's left of the Territory only to find it full of Tom Sawyers selling quiche or playing some other stupid game that mortgages their own freedom and threatens to destroy ours."more