Rick Bass is the author of over twenty books of fiction and nonfiction. Bass received the 1995 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship, and has been a finalist for the Story Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has appeared in the Pushcart and O. Henry anthologies, Best American Short Stories, and numerous literary magazines. His memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Bryan Woolley of the Dallas Morning News said, "Probably no American writer since Hemingway has written about man-in-nature more beautifully or powerfully than Rick Bass."