Loren Eiseley

Loren Corey Eiseley
Born	September 3, 1907 Lincoln, Nebraska
Died	July 9, 1977 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Kansas, BA (1933) University of Pennsylvania, MA, PhD (1937)
Known for	Nature writer, educator, philosopher
Awards	36 honorary degrees; Phi Beta Kappa Prize for "Best science book", Darwin's Century
Scientific career
Fields	Anthropology
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania

Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907 – July 9, 1977) was a highly respected anthropologist, science writer, ecologist, and poet. He published books of essays, biography, and general science in the 1950s through the 1970s.

Eiseley is best known for the poetic essay style, called the "concealed essay". He used this to explain complex scientific ideas, such as human evolution, to the general public. He is also known for his writings about humanity's relationship with the natural world; these writings helped inspire the modern environmental movement.

Among his books are The Immense Journey (1957), Darwin's Century (1958), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country (1971), and the memoir, All the Strange Hours (1975).

Early life

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Eiseley lived his childhood with a hard-working father and deaf mother who suffered from possible mental illness. Their home was located on the outskirts of town, where, as author Naomi Brill writes, it was "removed from the people and the community from which they felt set apart through poverty and family misfortune." His autobiography, All the Strange Hours, begins with his "childhood experiences as a sickly afterthought, weighed down by the loveless union of his parents."

His father, Clyde, was a hardware salesman who worked long hours for little pay, writes Brill. However, as an amateur Shakespearian actor, he was able to give his son a "love for beautiful language and writing." His mother was a self-taught prairie artist who was considered a beautiful woman, but had lost her hearing in childhood. Her deafness often gave rise to irrational and destructive behavior which left him feeling distant from her, and which contributed to his parent's unhappy marriage.

Living at the edge of town, however, led to his early interest in the natural world, which he turned to when being home was too difficult. There, he would play in the caves and creek banks nearby. Fortunately, there were others who opened the door to a happier life. His half brother, Leo, for instance, gave him a copy of Robinson Crusoe with which he taught himself to read. Thereafter, he managed to find ways to get to the public library and while there became a voracious reader.

Eiseley later attended the Lincoln Public Schools where in high school he wrote that he wanted to be a nature writer. He would later describe the lands around Lincoln as "flat and grass covered and smiling so serenely up at the sun that they seemed forever youthful, untouched by mind or time--a sunlit, timeless prairie over which nothing passed but antelope or wandering bird." But disturbed by his home situation and the illness and recent death of his father, he dropped out of school and worked at menial jobs.

He eventually enrolled in the University of Nebraska, wrote for the newly formed journal, Prairie Schooner, and went on archeology digs for the natural history Museum. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1927?, however, and left the university to move to the western desert, believing the drier air would improve his condition. While there, he soon became restless and unhappy, which led him to hoboing around the country by hopping on freight trains (as many did during the Great Depression).

Professor of religion, Dr. Richard Wentz, writes about this period: "Loren Eiseley had been a drifter in his youth. From the plains of Nebraska he had wandered across the American West. Sometimes sickly, at other times testing his strength with that curious band of roving exiles who searched the land above the rippling railroad ties, he explored his soul as he sought to touch the distant past. He became a naturalist and a bone hunter because something about the landscape had linked his mind to the birth and death of life itself.

Academic career

Eiseley eventually returned to the University of Nebraska and received a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Bachelor of Science in Geology/Anthropology. While at Nebraska, he served as editor of the literary magazine "The Prairie Schooner," publishing his poetry and short stories. Undergraduate expeditions to western Nebraska and the southwest to hunt for fossils and human artifacts provide the inspiration for much of his very early work. He later noted that he came to anthropology from paleontology, preferring to leave human burial sites undisturbed unless destruction threatened.

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He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1937 and wrote his dissertation entitled Three Indices of Quaternary Time and Their Bearing Upon Pre-History: a Critique, which launched his academic career. He began teaching at the University of Kansas that same year. During World War II, Eiseley taught anatomy to reservist pre-med students at Kansas.

In 1944 he left the University of Kansas to assume the role of head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oberlin College in Ohio. By 1947 he returned to the University of Pennsylvania to head its Anthropology Department. He was elected president of the American Institute of Human Paleontology in 1949. From 1959 to 1961, he was provost at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1961 the University of Pennsylvania created a special interdisciplinary chairmanship for him.

Dr. Eiseley was also a fellow of many distinguished professional societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society.

At the time of his death in 1977, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science, and the curator of the Early Man section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. He had received thirty-six honorary degrees over a period of twenty years, and was the most honored member of the University of Pennsylvania since Benjamin Franklin. In 1976 he won the Bradford Washburn Award of the Boston Museum of Science for his "outstanding contribution to the public understanding of science" and the Joseph Wood Krutch Medal from the Humane Society of the United States for his "significant contribution forthe improvement of life and the environment in this country."

Books

In addition to his scientific and academic work, in the mid 1940s Eiseley began to publish the essays which brought him to the attention of a wider audience. Anthropologist Pat Shipman writes, "the words that flowed from his pen ... the images and insights he revealed, the genius of the man as a writer, outweigh his social disability. The words were what kept him in various honored posts; the words were what caused the students to flock to his often aborted courses; the words were what earned him esteemed lectureships and prizes. His contemporaries failed to see the duality of the man, confusing the deep, wise voice of Eiseley's writings with his own personal voice. He was a natural fugitive, a fox at the wood's edge (in his own metaphor)..."

In an interview on National Public Radio (NPR), author Michael Lind said, "Before the rise of a self-conscious intelligentsia, most educated people -- as well as the unlettered majority -- spent most of their time in the countryside or, if they lived in cities, were a few blocks away from farmland or wilderness. ... At the risk of sounding countercultural, I suspect that thinkers who live in sealed, air-conditioned boxes and work by artificial light (I am one) are as unnatural as apes in cages at zoos. Naturalists like Eiseley in that sense are the most normal human beings to be found among intellectuals, because they spend a lot of time outdoors and know the names of the plants and animals they see. ... For all of his scientific erudition, Eiseley has a poetic, even cinematic, imagination."

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The Immense Journey (1957)

His first book, The Immense Journey, was a collection of writings about the history of humanity, and the rare science book that appealed to a mass audience. It has sold over a million copies and has been published in at least 16 languages.

Author Orville Prescott wrote, "Consider the case of Loren Eiseley, author of The Immense Journey, who can sit on a mountain slope beside a prairie-dog town and imagine himself back in the dawn of the Age of mammals eighty million years ago: 'There by a tree root I could almost make him out, that shabby little Paleocene rat, eternal tramp and world wanderer, father of all mankind.' ... his prose is often lyrically beautiful, something that considerable reading in the works of anthropologists had not led me to expect. ... The subjects discussed here include the human ancestral tree, water and its significance to life, the mysteries of cellular life, 'the secret and remote abysses' of the sea, the riddle of why human beings alone among living creatures have brains capable of abstract thought and are far superior to their mere needs for survival, the reasons why Dr. Eiseley is convinced that there are no men or man-like animals on other planets, ...".

He offers an example of Eiseley's style: "There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains--if anything contains--the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves."

Darwin's Century (1958)

His book Darwin’s Century won the Phi Beta Kappa prize for best book in science in 1958.

The Firmament of Time (1960) Read online

Discussing the book, Professor of Zoology, Leslie Dunn wrote, "How can man of 1960, burdened with the knowledge of the world external to him, and with the consciousness that scientific knowledge is attained through continually interfering with nature, 'bear his part' and gain the hope and confidence to live in the new world to which natural science has given birth? ... The answer comes in the eloquent, moving central essay of his new book. " The New Yorker wrote, "Dr. Eiseley describes with zest and admiration the giant steps that have led man, in a scant three hundred years, to grasp the nature of his extraordinary past and to substitute a natural world for a world of divine creation and intervention. . . . An irresistible inducement to partake of the almost forgotten excitements of reflection." And the review in The Chicago Tribune, added, "[This book] has a warm feeling for all natural phenomena; it has a rapport with man and his world and his problems; ... it has hope and belief. And it has the beauty of prose that characterizes Eiseley’s philosophical moods."

It was awarded the 1961 John Burroughs Medal for the best publication in the field of Nature Writing.

The Unexpected Universe (1969) Read online

Poet W.H. Auden wrote, "The main theme of The Unexpected Universe is Man as the Quest Hero, the wanderer, the voyager, the seeker after adventure, knowledge, power, meaning, and righteousness." He quotes from the book to explain his meaning:

"Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war. . . Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember or has gotten wrong. . . Bereft of instinct, he must search continually for meanings. . . Man was a reader before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe."

Reviewers at Amazon.com: "I think every book this man ever wrote is a masterpiece. His style is thoughtful, haunting, and beautiful. They are all good. Theodosius Dobzhansky described him as "...a Proust miraculously turned into an evolutionary anthropologist..." and Ray Bradbury wrote glowing reviews of many of his books including this one. ... Here he writes from a naturalist's perspective on the unexpected and symbloic aspects of the universe. Read about seeds, heiroglyphs on shells, the Ice Age, lost tombs, city dumps and primative Man. The underlying theme is the desolation and renewal of our planet's history and experience."

"Loren Eiseley's dark, brooding prose is unique in the annals of nature writing. The Unexpected Universe features some of what are considered Eiseley's best essays. Heavily autobiographical and deeply personal, these essays are not cheerful ramblings on the joy of communing with nature. They are bleak, lonely musings on the human condition."

The Invisible Pyramid (1971) Read online

Gregory McNamee, of Amazon.com writes, "In 1910 young Loren Eiseley watched the passage of Halley’s Comet with his father. The boy who became a famous naturalist was never again to see the spectacle except in his imagination. That childhood event contributed to the profound sense of time and space that marks The Invisible Pyramid. This collection of essays, first published shortly after Americans landed on the moon, explores inner and outer space, the vastness of the cosmos, and the limits of what can be known. Bringing poetic insight to scientific discipline, Eiseley makes connections between civilizations past and present, multiple universes, humankind, and nature.

"Eiseley took the occasion of the lunar landing to consider how far humans had to go in understanding their own small corner of the universe, their home planet, much less what he called the 'cosmic prison' of space. Likening humans to the microscopic phagocytes that dwell within our bodies, he grumpily remarks, 'We know only a little more extended reality than the hypothetical creature below us. Above us may lie realms it is beyond our power to grasp.' Science, he suggests, would be better put to examining that which lies immediately before us, although he allows that the quest to explore space is so firmly rooted in Western technological culture that it was unlikely to be abandoned simply because of his urging. Eiseley's opinion continues to be influential among certain environmentalists, and these graceful essays show why that should be so.

Book excerpt:

"Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. ... Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggest it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. ... If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth."

The Night Country (1971) Read online

Kirkus Reviews wrote, "... like the medievalists, Eiseley reads nature as the second book of God's revelation, mysterious and heavy with latent, lurking fertility. His sizable audience should welcome the latest voyage in search of the secret springs of creativity - evolutionary, cosmic, mental - as a muted adumbration of temporal mortality." Other reviews: "Eiseley has met strange creatures in the night country, and he tells marvelous stories about them . . . For Eiseley, storytelling is never pure entertainment. The autobiographical tales keep illustrating the theses that wind through all his writing - the fallibility of science, the mystery of evolution, the surprise of life."- Time Magazine; "A sort of Odyssey by a man in dialogue with nature and evolution; Eiseley remains one of our foremost humanists-and prose stylists." - Christian Century;

In a published essay, alumni Carl Hoffman wrote, "An old man who had done almost all of his writing late, late at night, was speaking to a younger man who liked to read in those same dark hours. In a chapter entitled 'One Night’s Dying,' Eiseley said to me: 'It is thus that one day and the next are welded together, and that one night’s dying becomes tomorrow’s birth. I, who do not sleep, can tell you this.' Today, well into my fifties, in the midst of a lifetime of almost compulsive reading, I still regard The Night Country as my all-time favorite book."

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All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life (1975) Read online

"In All the Strange Hours," states Amazon.com, "Eiseley turns his considerable powers of reflection and discovery on his own life to weave a compelling story, related with the modesty, grace, and keen eye for a telling anecdote that distinguish his work. His story begins with his childhood experiences as a sickly afterthought, weighed down by the loveless union of his parents. From there he traces the odyssey that led to his search for early postglacial man—and into inspiriting philosophical territory—culminating in his uneasy achievement of world renown. Eiseley crafts an absorbing self-portrait of a man who has thought deeply about his place in society as well as humanity’s place in the natural world."

The Star Thrower (1978)

His friend and science fiction author Ray Bradbury, wrote,"The book will be read and cherished in the year 2001. It will go to the Moon and Mars with future generations. Loren Eiseley's work changed my life." And from the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, "An astonishing breadth of knowledge, infinite capacity for wonder and compassionate interest for everyone and everthing in the universe.

Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X (1979)

The book attempts to solve a mystery: "Samuel Butler, a master of acrimonious polemic, confronted Charles Darwin with the sorest of all scientific subjects—a dispute about priority. In Evolution Old and New (1879), Butler accused Darwin of slighting the evolutionary speculations of Buffon, Lamarck, and his own grandfather Erasmus." The Kirkus Reviews calls it, "...an essay devoted to resurrecting the name and importance of Edward Blyth, a 19th-century naturalist. Eiseley credits Blyth with the development of the idea, and even the coining of the words "natural selection," which Darwin absorbed and enlarged upon...[and] some thoughts on Darwin's Descent of Man; and a concluding speculation on the meaning of evolution. The last piece is very much Eiseley's poetic from-whence-do-we come/whither-do-we-go vein.

The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley (1987) Read online

Just before his death, he asked his wife to destroy the personal notebooks which he kept since 1953. However, she compromised by disassembling them so they couldn't be used. After great effort, however, his good friend, and the editor of this compilation, Kenneth Heuer, managed to reassemble most of his notebooks into readable form. It includes a variety of Eiseley's writings, such as childhood stories, sketches while he was a vagabond, old family pictures, unpublished poems, portions of unfinished novels, and letters to and from literary admirers like W.H. Auden, Howard Nemerov, Lewis Mumford and Ray Bradbury.

Author Robert Finch, in a review of the book, writes, "Like Melville, Eiseley thought of himself, and by extension all mankind, as 'an orphan, a wood child, a changeling,' a cosmic outcast born into a world that afforded him no true home." He adds that his "distinctive gift as a writer was to take powerfully formative personal influences of family and place and fuse them with his intellectual meditations on universal topics such as evolution, human consciousness and the weight of time. ... he found metaphors that released a powerful view of man's fate in the modern world." As Kenneth Heuer writes, "there are countless examples of Eiseley's empathy with life in all its forms, and particularly with its lost outcasts...the love that transends the boundaries of species was the highest spiritual expression he knew.

Finch adds, "We are grateful for a life and a sensibility that would be welcome in any age, but never more so than in our increasingly depersonalized world. ... he made a generation of readers 'see the world through his eyes.' In an undated passage, circa 1959, Eiseley wrote, 'Man is alone in the universe...Only in the act of love, in rare and hidden communion with nature, does man escape himself.'" The Lost Notebooks contains numerous examples of his "creative and sympathetic imagination, even when that creation takes place in the solitude of journals never meant for public eyes."

From other reviews: "Eiseley has rightly been called 'the modern Thoreau.'" -Publishers Weekly; "[an] extensive and enlightening glimpses ... into the intellectual and emotional workshop of one of the most original and influential American essayists of this century." -New York Times Book Review; "Eiseley's great genius for the art of the word coupled with a poetic insight into the connection between science and humanism shines through in page after page. . . . This is a book that will be read and quoted and whose pages will grow thin with wear from hands in continued search of new meaning within its words and images." -Los Angeles Times; "it will enhance any dedicated reader's knowledge of this most remarkable literary naturalist. . . . They provide more than a glimpse into Eiseley's mind and imagination." -The Bloomsbury Review; "It is a joy, like finding a lost Rembrandt in the attic, to discover that Eiseley left behind a legacy." -San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle.

Death and burial

Loren Eiseley's headstone in West Laurel Hill Cemetery - "We loved the earth but could not stay"

Loren Eiseley died on July 9, 1977, and was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Eiseley's wife, Mabel Langdon Eiseley, died on July 27, 1986, and is buried next to him, in the Westlawn section of the cemetery, in Lot 366. The inscription on their headstone reads, "We loved the earth but could not stay", which is a line from his poem The Little Treasures.

A library in the Lincoln City Libraries public library system is named after Eiseley.

Loren Eiseley was awarded the Distinguished Nebraskan Award and inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. A bust of his likeness resides in the Nebraska State Capitol.

Legacy

"There can be no question that Loren Eiseley maintains a place of eminence among nature writers. His extended explorations of human life and mind, set against the backdrop of our own and other universes are like those to be found in every book of nature writing currently available. . . .We now routinely expect our nature writers to leap across the chasm between science, natural history, and poetry with grace and ease. Eiseley made the leap at a time when science was science, and literature was, well, literature. . . . His writing delivered science to nonscientists in the lyrical language of earthly metaphor, irony, simile, and narrative, all paced like a good mystery." The Bloomsbury Review

On October 25, 2007, the Governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, officially declared that year "The Centennial Year of Loren Eiseley." In a written proclamation, he encouraged all Nebraskans "to read Loren Eisely's writings and to appreciate in those writings the richness and beauty of his language, his ability to depict the long, slow passage of time and the meaning of the past in the present, his portrayal of the relationships among all living things and his concern for the future."

Bibliography

Major works

• Charles Darwin, (1956) W.H. Freeman
• The Immense Journey (1957) Vintage Books, Random House
• Darwin's Century (1958) Doubleday
• The Firmament of Time (1960) Atheneum
• The Man Who Saw Through Time (1973) Scribner
• The Mind as Nature (1962) Harper and Row
• Man, Time, and Prophecy, (1966) Harcourt, Brace & World
• The Unexpected Universe (1969) Harcourt, Brace and World
• The Invisible Pyramid: A Naturalist Analyses the Rocket Century (1971) Devin-Adair Pub.
• The Night Country: Reflections of a Bone-Hunting Man (1971) Scribner
• Another Kind of Autumn (1977) Scribner
• The Star Thrower (1978) Times Books, Random House
• Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X: New Light on the Evolutionists (1979) E.P. Dutton
• The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, Kenneth Heuer editor, (1987) Little Brown & Co.
• How Flowers Changed the World, with photographs by Gerald Ackerman. (1996) Random House

Memoirs

• All The Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life (1975) Scribner
• The Brown Wasps: A Collection of Three Essays in Autobiography (1969) Perishable Press, Mount Horeb, WI

Poetry

• Notes of an Alchemist (1972) Scribner, McMillan
• The Innocent Assassins (1973) Scribner
• All The Night Wings (1978) Times Books

References

• Angyal, Andrew J., Loren Eiseley (Boston, MA : G. K. Hall & Co., 1983). ISBN 0-8057-7381-9
• Christianson, Gale E., Fox at the Wood's Edge: A Biography of Loren Eiseley. H.Holt Brown, 1990, University of Nebraska Press 2000 reissue: ISBN 0-8032-6410-0
• Gerber, Leslie E. and Margaret McFadden, Loren Eiseley (New York : Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983). ISBN 0-8044-5424-8

External links

• Returning Insight to Storytelling: Science, Stories, and Loren Eiseley An essay exploring Eiseley's memoir All The Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life.
• The Man from the Sunflower Forest: A Loren Eiseley Reader
• Searching for Loren Eiseley: An Attempt at Reconstruction from a Few Fragments
• NET Television
• http://www.lincolnlibraries.org/depts/hr/wpa/ne_fwp_12.html Loren Eiseley and the Nebraska Federal Writers' Project.
• http://www.lincolnlibraries.org/depts/hr/ArchiveGuides/EiseleyFront.html Archival collections relating to Loren Eiseley.
• Biography-West Laurel Hill Cemetery web site