James Oliver Curwood ― God's Country and the Man

When the wounded bear he faced on a mountain ledge that day turned aside, James Oliver Curwood's relief was that his life had been spared. More than that resulted from this encounter; his life was profoundly altered. Curwood was 35 that summer of 1914, and already a well-known author of Great Lakes fiction and non-fiction and novels of romance and adventure set in the Canadian north. Now he would become an avid conservationist in the early days of that movement, a change that would lead indirectly to his death 13 years later.
In the meantime, however, he wrote relentlessly - magazine stories and books and then for the new medium of motion pictures. Like many authors of his day, he was, for a time, actively involved in movie-making, until the plight of the forests and wildlife in his home state of Michigan turned his energies toward conservation.
A man ahead of his time, and quickly forgotten after his death in 1927, his gift of himself to his readers and to nature has finally come to be appreciated again two generations later.