Jack Kerouac may not have been the first writer to be charmed by Tucson, but his description of this literary desert haven may be the most poetic.
THE WRITTEN WORD BY MARGARET REGAN
Tucson comes alive through our books and authors.
38 | Tucson Official Travel Guide
“Tucson is situated in beautiful mesquite riverbed country, overlooked by the snowy Catalina range…,” the beat writer declared in his masterwork, On the Road, published in 1957. Sixty-plus years later, the landscape is just as lovely and the city is abuzz with book readings, writing programs, bookstores, publishing houses and one of the biggest book fairs in the country, the annual Tucson Festival of Books. And the old Mexican town turned cool modern hub has been home to legions of bestselling authors from novelist Barbara Kingsolver to the crusty desert sage Charles Bowden. An environmentalist and champion of social justice, Kingsolver set her first book, The Bean Trees, right here in Tucson. The late Bowden, like the Tucson authors Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire) and Joseph Wood Krutch (The Desert Year) before him, wrote fierce books advocating for the fragile desert landscape. After he died, the county gave his name to a community center in the Catalinas, the mountains he celebrated in Frog Mountain Blues.