Last August, two men in rural Georgia announced that they had\nkilled Bigfoot. The claim drew instant, feverish attention, leading\nto more than 1,000 news stories worldwide—despite the fact that\nnearly everyone knew it was a hoax. Though Bigfoot may not exist,\nthere’s no denying Bigfoot mania.

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With Bigfoot, Joshua Blu Buhs traces the wild and wooly\nstory of America’s favorite homegrown monster. He begins with\nnineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of\nAmerica, treks to the Himalayas to reckon with the Abominable\nSnowman, then takes us to northern California in 1958, when reports\nof a hairy hominid loping through remote woodlands marked Bigfoot’s\nemergence as a modern marvel. Buhs delves deeply into the trove of\nlore and misinformation that has sprung up around Bigfoot in the\nensuing half century. We meet charlatans, pseudo-scientists, and\ndedicated hunters of the beast—and with Buhs as our guide, the\nfocus is always less on evaluating their claims than on\nunderstanding why Bigfoot has inspired all this drama and devotion\nin the first place. What does our fascination with this monster say\nabout our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class,\nconsumerism, and the media?

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Writing with a scientist’s skepticism but an enthusiast’s deep\nengagement, Buhs invests the story of Bigfoot with the detail and\npower of a novel, offering the definitive take on this elusive\nbeast.

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