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Some 75 years ago, a young L.A.-based artist and poet vanished 50 miles southeast of the small southern Utah village of Escalante. Since that chilly November of 1934, Everett Ruess has emerged in the popular imagination as a mythic wunderkind whose mysterious disappearance assures him of a place in the pantheon of misunderstood artists.

Now come two new books, the first to attempt full-scale biographies of young Ruess, not quite 21 when he disappeared. The first, Finding Everett Ruess: The Remarkable Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer, is by prominent mountaineer-journalist David Roberts. The second is Pulitzer Prize-winner Phillip L. Fradkin's Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife.

Each book covers similar territory, while offering its author's own unique approach and interpretation. Roberts' engaging, fast-paced study exhibits a journalist's preoccupations and panache. It is the more judgmental of Everett's youthful prejudices and missteps, and the more skeptical of psychological discussions of Everett's mental and emotional states, including his sexual orientation.

Much to Roberts' credit, he does not shy away from treating the erroneous identification of bones said to have been Everett's found in southern Utah in 2008-2009, an embarrassing, much-publicized drama in which Roberts played a major role. In fact, Roberts's mea culpa makes for some of his book's most fascinating reading.

Fradkin's analysis is the more academic and scholarly, complete with footnotes and endnotes. Fradkin's is also the more traditionally biographical in scope and treatment. Fradkin plumbs the documentary sources more fully (now, thanks to the Ruess family, housed in the Marriott Library at the University of Utah), offering an informed, nuanced analysis and appreciation of Everett.

Unlike Roberts, Fradkin embraces psychology as a tool in approaching Everett. Fradkin's tentative diagnosis builds upon previous treatments of Everett as possibly suffering from the early stages of a bipolar disorder and is compelling and insightful. It also, unfortunately, earned Fradkin the disapprobation of Everett's surviving nephews and nieces. Fradkin also treats in more detail and with considerable insight questions surrounding Everett's sexual orientation.

Roberts devotes some of his discussion to events following Everett's disappearance, notably tracking the host of con men who preyed upon the enduring hope and grief of Everett's parents. He points to the tantalizing possibility that some of Everett's lost diaries and letters — which, Roberts speculates, may have been stolen — may actually be locked away in the safes and libraries of one or more private collectors. Fradkin touches on these topics, but is more interested in family dynamics, especially as they played out between Everett's older brother, Waldo, and his father following Everett's disappearance.

Fradkin uses the last chapter in his book to dissect Roberts' and others' involvement in the misidentification of Native American bones as belonging to Everett. Where Roberts tends to blame computer software, Fradkin is unsparing in suggesting that the wrong people used the wrong equipment and methods to arrive at what could only be the wrong results.

Fradkin's arguments are not easily dismissed. (Fradkin is scheduled to speak in the Salt Lake Public Library on Wednesday, Sept. 21, at 7 p.m.)

Roberts' and Fradkin's books provide clues and hints as to what may have happened to Everett in November 1934. But the mystery endures. Everett may have summarized his own life best when he wrote six months before his disappearance: "Even when to my senses the world is not incredibly beautiful or fantastic, I am overwhelmed by the appalling strangeness and intricacy of the curiously tangled knot of life, and at the way that knot unwinds, making everything clear and inevitable, however unfortunate or wonderful."

Everett Ruess survives today one of those rare individuals forever destined to remain an enigma, a looming spectral presence whose infectious wanderlust and love of nature and beauty resonate with each new generation.

Gary James Bergera is the author of The Murderous Pain of Living: Thoughts on the Death of Everett Ruess, Utah Historical Quarterly 67 (Winter 1998). He lives in Salt Lake City.