I first encountered her through her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and her work reminded me of essayists of the 1960s and 70s such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, who wove together personal experience, academic research, cultural history and pop culture into a new kind of nonfiction that seemed energetic and flexible enough to encompass any subject and offer new ways of seeing it. T here was a time when Rebecca Solnit was a kind of underground secret, like a cult band you had to seek out in obscure venues and only the cognoscenti knew about hearing her writing mentioned by a new acquaintance meant you knew you’d found a soulmate.
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