Characters in The Overstory

Main characters

• Olivia Vandergriff

  A reckless college student who, after surviving a near-death electrocution, begins hearing voices from the natural world that compel her to travel west and join the forest defense movement.

• Nicholas Hoel

  An artist descended from a long line of Iowa farmers who inherited a monthly photographic archive of a single, blight-surviving American chestnut tree.

• Patricia Westerford

  A visionary, marginalized botanist whose pioneering research reveals that trees are highly social, communicative, and interconnected organisms.

• Mimi Ma

  A successful ceramic engineer and daughter of a Chinese immigrant who is radicalized into environmental activism after witnessing the destruction of trees outside her office.

• Douglas Pavlicek

  A wounded Vietnam War veteran who, after being saved by a falling banyan tree, dedicates his life to replanting forests and fighting industrial logging.

• Neelay Mehta

  A brilliant, paralyzed tech entrepreneur who creates a massively popular virtual world game inspired by the complex systems of redwood forests.

• Adam Appich

  An inquisitive psychology student who studies the cognitive biases of environmental activists, only to find himself drawn directly into their cause.

• Ray Brinkman

  An conventional intellectual property lawyer whose life and marriage are slowly transformed by his relationship with his wife and the natural world.

• Dorothy Cazaly

  An unconventional stenographer and amateur actress who, alongside her husband Ray, undergoes a late-life awakening to the presence of the trees around them.