Through a deep and engaging analysis, Tara Kathleen Kelly’s The Hunter Elite provides a refreshing perspective on the critical role that sportsmen and their hunting narratives played in the development of the early environmental movement. This is a valuable study of this important moment in American history."" - Greg Dehler, author of The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife""Elegantly written, The Hunter Elite offers fresh insights on the rise of sport hunting and wilderness recreation. Kelly provocatively upends our usual assumptions about the rise of hunting during the turn of the twentieth century, eschewing the rote, rugged response to the ‘crisis of masculinity.’ Instead, her deep engagement with both the sportsmen themselves—as both hunters and writers—and with the expanding modern apparatus of travel, tourism, and publishing offers a compelling new framework to see the rise and decline of big-game hunting and the peculiar type of American conservation that emerged from this era."" - Phoebe S. K. Young, coeditor of Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics ""This lucid book uses intertextual analysis to expand our understanding of the culture and context of American big-game hunting. It takes up the interesting question of how a select group of East Coast hunters used their narratives to transform recreational hunting into the highest form of masculine labor and then examines how the emergence of other types of hunters, including women, made these narratives a potent site for debates about gender roles, power, and identity in early twentieth-century America."" - Angela Thompsell, author of Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire
