The Overstory
Richard Powers (2018)
“Nine strangers are pulled into the fate of the world's last forests — a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that makes trees the protagonists of human history.”
At a Glance
Nine Americans — a soldier, a scientist, a tech billionaire, an animator, a grad student, an actuary, a farmer's daughter, a visionary, and an artist — find their lives transformed by trees. Drawn together across decades, several become radical activists fighting to stop the logging of old-growth forests. Some are arrested. One dies. One loses her legs. Two disappear into the woods. The novel moves from intimate family history to legal thriller to spiritual meditation, arguing that humans are not the world's main characters — trees are, and we've been destroying them without understanding what we're losing.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019. It is the most commercially and critically successful ecological novel in American literary history, making the New York Times bestseller list for months and being credited with measurably increasing public interest in mycorrhizal research and forest conservation. More than any previous work of fiction, it brought plant neuroscience — specifically Suzanne Simard's research on tree communication — to a general audience.
Diction Profile
Shifts between nine character registers — from the spare Midwestern plainness of Nick's sections to the dense Latinate precision of Patricia's biology to the abstract architectural language of Neelay's code. The baseline register is literary-formal with heavy deployment of botanical, ecological, and biological vocabulary.
High but distributed unevenly