author
Joaquin Miller
1837–1913
A colorful poet-adventurer of the American West, he turned frontier landscapes and larger-than-life stories into verse that won him fame as the "Poet of the Sierras." His work helped shape a romantic image of the West for readers in both the United States and Britain.
8 Audiobooks
Eleven Possible Cases
by Frank R. Stockton, Edgar Fawcett, Franklin Fyles, Anna Katharine Green, Henry Harland, Ingersoll Lockwood, Joaquin Miller, Kirk Munroe, Brainard Gardner Smith, Maurice Thompson, A. C. (Andrew Carpenter) Wheeler
Shadows of Shasta
by Joaquin Miller
Songs of the Mexican Seas
by Joaquin Miller
The Ship in the Desert
by Joaquin Miller
True Bear Stories
by Joaquin Miller
Chants for the Boer
by Joaquin Miller
The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories
by Joaquin Miller
First Fam'lies of the Sierras
by Joaquin Miller
About the author
Born Cincinnatus Hiner Miller in Indiana in 1837, he moved west with his family to Oregon Territory as a boy and later reinvented himself as Joaquin Miller. His life fed his legend: he worked in the West, spent time around mining camps and frontier communities, and became known almost as much for his self-fashioned persona as for his writing.
Miller found major success with poems and prose that celebrated the drama, scale, and myth of the American frontier. He was especially associated with the Sierra Nevada and became widely known as the "Poet of the Sierras." Among his best-known works is Songs of the Sierras (1871), and his poem "Columbus" was once especially familiar to generations of readers.
Part of his fame came from the image he projected—buckskin, sombrero, flowing hair and beard, and vivid tales of western adventure—which helped make him a literary celebrity, especially in Britain before he was fully embraced at home. Even when later readers questioned some of the exaggerations in his life story, his writing remained important for its energetic, romantic vision of the nineteenth-century West.