Author
The Overstory
The Overstory is a large-scale literary novel in which the lives of nine Americans become entangled with trees, forests, scientific discovery, and environmental resistance. Its opening movement presents several largely independent personal and family histories. Each history contains an encounter with a particular tree or species—a surviving American chestnut, a banyan, a mulberry, a maple, or the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest—that changes how a character understands time, survival, or human responsibility. These separate narratives eventually converge around forest defense and then branch apart again as the consequences of activism reshape the characters' lives. The novel is divided into four parts—“Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds”—so that its architecture follows an arboreal pattern. This is more than decorative organization. The early biographies establish the characters' origins; the central sections connect them through shared purposes and conflicts; and the conclu…