The Legend of Everett Ruess is a historical fiction account of a vagabond who roamed the Southwest in the early thirties. I imagine Everett as a cross between a young Indiana Jones and a young Walt Whitman. He painted landscapes and wrote beautiful letters—eighty of which his parents collected after he disappeared. He came to the Southwest in the early thirties when he was sixteen and traveled for four years, living with Hopi and Navajo while
exploring the Southwest. Edward Abbey wrote about Everett in Desert Solitaire and Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild.