Sand County Foundation:
“Seventy-two years ago, on April 14, 1948, Aldo Leopold received a letter from Oxford University Press informing him that they would publish the book manuscript he had been working on during the war years. After it had been rejected by several publishers, Leopold must have been pleased that his masterpiece would finally be published, but his delight was to be short-lived. On April 21 he died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor fight a grass fire near his beloved shack, which was the setting for the essays in the first half of the manuscript.”
