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In the United States in recent years, a kind of writing variously called nature writing or landscape writing has begun to receive critical attention, leading some to assume that this is a relatively new kind of work.
In fact, writing that takes into account the impact nature and place have on culture is one of the oldest - and perhaps most singular - threads in American writing.
Melville in Moby-Dick, Thoreau, of course, and novelists such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner come quickly to mind here, and more recently Peter Matthiessen, Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, and the poets W.S. Merwin, Amy Clampitt and Gary Snyder.