Everett Ruess wasn't supposed to disappear.
At sixteen, he walked away from "the white man's world" and stepped alone into the vast, empty Southwest-years before tourists and movie crews ever set foot in Monument Valley or the canyon country. For four wild years, he wandered deserts and cliffs almost no one else in America had seen, sending home letters so honest, defiant, and full of wonder that they became legend.
Then, at twenty, he vanished.
In The Legend of Everett Ruess, award-winning novelist Robert Louis DeMayo takes Ruess's real letters and journeys and weaves them into a vivid historical novel that reads like a private doorway into another time.
But this is more than a biographical retelling. DeMayo introduces a Hopi "time loop" that bends Everett's final journey back on itself: at the end of his fourth year, he is drawn into a sacred cycle that returns him to the beginning. The result is a haunting, circular narrative in which time, memory, and landscape fold together-inviting you to see Everett's four short years not as a straight line, but as a powerful, repeating vision.
If you've ever dreamed of dropping everything and walking into the wild-no map, no plan, no way back-Everett Ruess did it for you. This book lets you travel with him, letter by letter, canyon by canyon, until you feel why some lives burn bright and brief, and why some legends refuse to die.
This is a novel for readers who want:
- A lived-in, boots-on-the-ground feel of the 1930s Southwest, before the postcards and the tour buses.
- A true historical figure brought to life from his own words, not just summarized on a plaque.
- A story that blends fact, myth, Indigenous time, and the raw yearning of youth into something genuinely different.
You walk beside Everett as he: - Scrambles through untouched canyons in Arizona and Utah during the Great Depression.
- Lives on almost nothing, making art, meeting Navajo and Hopi families, and testing how far a young soul can go.
- Writes home with a fierce, poetic voice-sometimes ecstatic, sometimes angry, always searching.
About the Author :
Robert Louis DeMayo took up writing at the age of twenty when he left his job as a biomedical engineer to explore the world. Over the coming years he traveled to every corner of the globe, experiencing approximately one hundred countries. He is a member of The Explorers Club and The Archaeological Institute of America. During his travels he worked extensively for the travel section of The Telegraph, out of Hudson, NH. For three years he worked as marketing director for Eos, a company that served as a travel office for six non-profit organizations and offered dives to the Titanic and the Bismarck, Antarctic voyages, African safaris and archaeological tours throughout the world. Following this, Robert worked for three years as a tour guide in Alaska and the Yukon during the summers, and as a jeep guide in Sedona, Arizona, during the winter. He was general manager at A Day in the West, a Jeep tour company in Sedona before he decided to write full time. He is the author of five novels: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt, The Light Behind Blue Circles, The Wayward Traveler, The Road to Sedona, and Pledge to the Wind, the Legend of Everett Ruess. His novel, The Wayward Traveler, won a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. This memoir-based story follows, Louis, a young adventurer, who runs out of money while abroad and creates a list of Rules for Survival to get by. His most recent novel, Pledge to the Wind, the Legend of Everett Ruess, is a historical fiction account of the young man's exploration of the southwest between 1931 and 1935. Currently he resides in Hollis, N.H. and Sedona, AZ, with his wife Diana and three daughters: Tavish Lee, Saydrin Scout, and Martika Louise.
