In November 1934 a twenty-year-old kid from Los Angeles rode two burros into Davis Gulch on the Escalante and never came out. The burros were found penned in the canyon. He wasn’t. He’d been wandering the Southwest since he was sixteen, making blockprints and writing letters home that people still quote, and on a doorsill in an Anasazi ruin he carved NEMO — Latin for nobody. Fradkin takes the myth apart. He gets at the family that built the legend afterward, the kid’s difficulty with people, his likely homosexuality, and the plain fact that he was often reckless and sometimes a jerk. Thankfully, not another hagiography.
Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife