Barry Lopez, Blue River, Oregon (David Liittschwager via AP)

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    A life as a journalist, writer and TV presenter

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December 27, 2020 Writer Barry Lopez, considered America's greatest contemporary nature and landscape storyteller, died on Christmas Day in Eugene, Oregon at the age of 75 from complications of prostate cancer. 



The announcement of the disappearance was made by his daughter, Stephanie Woodruff: "He passed away surrounded by the affection of his family," he said.



He was born on January 6, 1945 in Port Chester, New York. Lopez was a dispenser of wisdom born of an almost mythical intimacy with the natural world, intensely cultivated in his 'refuge' in Oregon. His passion for environmental issues had led him, in fact, to live in the woods along the McKenzie River, east of Eugene, where he had bought land and built a house, damaged by a fire last September.       



Author of seven essays and ten novels, Lopez has received numerous honors, including the prestigious National Book Award for non-fiction and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.



Among his books in Italian "Wolves and men" (Piemme), "Resistance" (Dalai Editore), "Letters from Paradise and other stories" (Neri Pozza), "Arctic dreams" (Dalai Editore), "From Greenland to Congo : 12 tales about nature "(Feltrinelli). "A profound geography. Writings on the earth and the imagination" is his first anthology published in Italian by Galaad Edizioni.       



With "Fragments of Heaven", published by Feltrinelli, Lopez offered the most arduous and sincere proof: the meticulous, devastating autobiographical account of the sexual abuse suffered as a child, for years, up to adolescence. At the center is the victim's loneliness in the face of a form of violence that challenges not only the family but the whole of society; an indictment against the unspeakable that is at the same time a path of liberation and reappropriation of one's self.



The narrator and essayist, critically acclaimed as one of the greatest 'landscape writers' in the United States, had established himself with "Wolves and Men" (1978), a longseller in the United States, where he received the John Burroughs Medal for best book of natural history. With great competence, sensitivity and passion, Barry Lopez draws an unpublished portrait of this feared and persecuted animal and leads the reader to discover its behavior, its psychology, the complex social structure of the herd and the difficult relationship with man.