Who is Loren Eiseley

"Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret? The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it. We cannot know all that has happened in the past, or the reason for all of these events, any more than we can with surety discern what lies ahead. We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know." The Immense Journey, 1957.

This is was the quote in the back cover of a paperback book I put my hands on in 1984...Somehow, it took me by storm...Reminding me of my first literary crush, Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet.

Loren Eisley has written some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read. According to Gene V. Glass, to regard him as a scientist who wrote well or a tinkerer with the left hand, would be a misapprehension, and worse, a condescension. And, as much as his writing might evoke the mystical and the gnostic (W. H. Auden), he was no mystic. He disliked tags: "As is readily observable, these are the poems of a bone Hunter and a naturalist, or at least those themes are Predominant in the book. Some have called me Gothic in my tastes. Others have chosen to regard me as a Platonist, a mystic, a concealed Christian, a midnight optimist. Like most poets I am probably all these things by turns, or such speculations are read into me by those who are pursuing some night path of their own."

Loren Corey 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, '60s and '70s.

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 helped inspire the 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 a hard childhood with a distant father and deaf mother who suffered from possible mental illness. After his father's death, he dropped out of high school and worked various jobs before enrolling in the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1933, Eiseley left the university and moved to the western United States desert, believing the air would improve his condition. However, he was restless and unhappy and eventually began hoboing around the country, riding freight trains (as many others did during the Great Depression). Eiseley later described these travels in All the Strange Hours, which many critics consider to be his masterpiece.

Academic Career

Eiseley eventually returned to the University of Nebraska and received his Bachelor of Science in English and Geology/Anthropology. There he served as editor of the literary magazine "The Prairie Schooner," publishing 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, hence his apprehension in disturbing human burial sites unless destruction threatened.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1937 and 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.

In 1947 he returned to Pennsylvania as head of the 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.

In 1961 the University of Pennsylvania created a special interdisciplinary chairmanship for him. In the same year he accepted a fellowship at Stanford University in California in the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. After a year at Stanford, he returned to his chairmanship in Pennsylvania, later named the Benjamin Franklin Professorship.

By the time of his death, Eiseley 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.

Writings

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. His first book, The Immense Journey, a collection of writings about the history of humanity, was published in 1957, and was the rare science book to appeal to a mass audience. His book Darwin's Century won the Phi Beta Kappa prize for best book in science in 1958.

The hallmark of Eiseley's writing was to combine scientific explorations with a deep sense of humanism and poetry. Instead of simply seeing the world as a set of scientific facts and figures, Eiseley used science to look for the deeper meaning of life, even while freely admitting that science could not answer all of the mysteries of existence. This led to Eiseley's recasting of the term magician from the merely metaphysical to that of the creative Muse.

In Eiseley's book, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X: New Light on the Evolutionists, he describes Darwin as a credit thief, not giving full due to a progressive creationist, Edward Blyth, or fellow evolutionist, Alfred Russel Wallace, for their contributions to the theory of natural selection.

Death and burial

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.

... you'll automatically be making a donation to The Acumen Fund, working to solve global poverty.

Doesn't that feel good?

The Immense Journey (1957)

Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (1958)

The Firmament of Time (1960)

Francis Bacon and the Modern Dilemma (1962)

The Unexpected Universe (1969)

The Brown Wasps: A Collection of Three Essays in Autobiography (1969)

The Invisible Pyramid (1970)

The Night Country (1971)

Notes of an Alchemist (poems) (1972)

The Man Who Saw Through Time (1973)

The Innocent Assassins (poems) (1973)

All The Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life (autobiography) (1975)

Another Kind of Autumn (poems) (1977)

The Star Thrower (1978)

The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley (Collection of notebooks: poems, drawings, seed ideas) (1987)

All the Night Wings (poems) (1979)

Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X. (1979)

Loren Eiseley Society formed in 1982 to encourage interest in and knowledge of Loren Eiseley's work, to provide a forum for readers and scholars, and to collect and preserve material about his life and writing

Returning Insight to Storytelling: Science, Stories, and Loren Eiseley by Jason Sanford

Nothing Strange I See:Reflections On Reading - A Life, by Dan Schneider, 8/15/01. Interesting Review of "All the Strange Hours", Loren Eiseley's autobiography

Searching for Loren Eiseley: An Attempt at Reconstruction from a Few Fragments by Gene V Glass, Arizona State University

Loren Eisley's page in American Buddha with several excerpts from his books; including the full version of my favorite, "The Immense Journey". You have to register to view the page, but it's worth it. The website is very interesting...really...