Career
He has published a revised and annotated edition of Geronimo"s 1906 autobiography. Turner received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981. Turner"s earlier works were histories and biographies, particularly of figures and periods of the American West: Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (1980) was described as a "provocative but unbalanced" account of the devastation caused by European settlers in North America.
Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (1985) is a biography of Scottish-born naturalist John Muir which the Journal of American History called "excellent and insightful" and Environmental History Review likewise called "excellent," noting that Turner had done research in the papers of Muir newly available at the University of the Pacific.
A review in Forest & Conservation History called it the best work on Muir to date, noting that two other biographies had recently been published. In a review of a new 2008 biography of the naturalist, Silas Chamberlin noted Turner"s book as "the last great work on Muir." Spirit of Place: The Making of An American Literary Landscape (1990).
Turner reviews nine American writers and locales they portrayed in their works, writing about his own sense of the places. A Border of Blue: Along the Gulf of Mexico From the Keys to the Yucatan (1993), a travelogue, was described by Entertainment Weekly as "sober and formal" prose which "often paints his own unease more clearly than the surrounding terrain".
When the Boys Came Back: Baseball and 1946 (1996) focused on the season when Americans such as Joe DiMaggio returned from World World War II to the baseball fields.
Kirkus said it "could be livelier" but was still of interest. Geronimo: His Own Story: The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior (1996) is a revised edition, with Turner"s introduction and notes, based on the 1906 autobiography of the Native American leader Geronimo as told to South.M. Barrett. Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer (2011) sheds light on the creation of Henry Miller"s infamous 1934 novel.
The Wall Street Journal called it "an entertaining and skillful evocation of the time when Miller"s memoir of bottom-feeding American expats in Paris was known as the dirtiest book in the world.".