Three First Editions in Jackets.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958-63-69. Listening Point. New York, 1958. Fine in fine dust jacket (unclipped).Runes of the North. New York, 1963. Fine in fine dust jacket (unclipped).Open Horizons, New York, 1969. Fine in fine dust jacket (unclipped).Sigurd earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1920. He returned briefly in 1922 for graduate work in geology, and earned a master’s degree in animal ecology from the University of Illinois in 1932. Meanwhile, in 1921 he married Elizabeth Dorothy Uhrenholdt. He spent the next 20 years teaching until he became a full-time writer and professional conservationist. Ely, a small city in northern Wisconsin where he had last taught, remained Sigurd’s home for the rest of his life. An iron-mining town on the Vermilion Range, it was located at the edge of several million acres of lake land wilderness in the United States and Canada known as the Quetico-Superior. Sigurd traveled and guided there for many years, and grew convinced that wilderness provided spiritual experiences vital to modern civilization. This conviction formed the basis of both his conservation and writing careers.Sigurd became an active conservationist in the 1920s, fighting to keep roads and then dams out of the Quetico-Superior. In the 1940s he spearheaded a precedent-setting fight to ban airplanes from flying into the area; the conflict propelled him to the front ranks of conservation. Sigurd served as wilderness ecologist for the Izaak Walton League of America from 1948 until his death, as vice-president and then president of the National Parks Association from 1951 to 1959, as vice-president and then president of the Wilderness Society from 1963 to 1971, and as an advisor to the National Park Service and to the secretary of the interior from 1959 to the early 1970s.He helped draft the Wilderness Act, which became law in 1964 and established the U.S. wilderness preservation system.