"Let me say at the outset that this book is not about Bear (he would be spoken of in the singular and masculine, capitalized and without an article), or it is only incidentally about him.
Bear is a template of the wilderness."--from the Introduction Since receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his novel. . . .
I am less interested in defining the being of Bear than in trying to understand something about the spirit of wilderness, of which Bear is a very particular expression. "Let me say at the outset that this book is not about Bear (he would be spoken of in the singular and masculine, capitalized and without an article), or it is only incidentally about him