Loren Eiseley: "Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation."

Loren Corey Eiseley (1907-1977)

Author, Philosopher, Anthropologist

President, The American Institute of Human Paleontology, 1949

Fellow of the American Institute for the Advancement of Science

Member of the National Academy of Sciences

Member of the National Academy of Arts & Letters

Member of the American Philosophical Society

Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science, University of Pennsylvania

Provost of the University of Pennsylvania

Guggenheim Fellow

Born to a sometime Shakespearean actor and a stone-deaf, mentally unstable mother who summoned him by stamping on the floor, Loren Eiseley led a solitary childhood on the fringes of Lincoln, Nebraska, and ordinary social life. He found an escape in the plains that surrounded the family home- rumored to be haunted- and the study of things in the wild.

His plans for an education were derailed by contracting TB in 1927; he was shipped out West and took up “bone collecting” in the desert while his health mended. Sad and rootless, he rode the rails with tramps in the Depression years, and was 26 before he finally obtained his BA in anthropology. His record gained him entry to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned by MA and Ph.D in 1939; after teaching at Oberlin and the University of Kansas, Eiseley returned to Penn in 1947 and taught there until he died.

He began publishing essays on- to borrow Douglas Adams’ title- life, the universe and everything- in the late Forties. Richard Finch, reviewing a posthumous collection of Eiseley’s works in 1987, summed up the writer’s outlook:

His pessimism, I think, was not simply idiosyncratic; it represents a curious, though still not widely recognized, Midwestern fascination with death and solitude. Not Mark Twain but Willa Cather and O. E. Rolvaag are Eiseley's spiritual forebears. The literature of the American plains is largely a literature of suffering, madness, purification by fire and bones under the sun, failed and buried lives; Eiseley became its first spokesman in the academic world.

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. In the discipline of archeology and paleontology - or bone hunting, as he liked to call it - he found metaphors that released a powerful view of man's fate in the modern world. In so doing he became a pivotal figure in the post-World War II movement to reintegrate scientific and humanistic sensibilities in the serious essay form.

Many of the notebook passages not only show us that Eiseley was keenly aware of the importance of fighting against ''the growing compartmentalization of thought,'' but also reveal how deeply he felt the scorn and ridicule of colleagues who criticized his excursions into ''mystical'' writing that was ''alien to the spirit of science.'' Eiseley himself clearly understood the different purposes of the scholarly and the literary scientific essays. He never confused the two, and there are some cogent and valuable defenses of the literary essay in these pages.

Eiseley’s first book, The Immense Journey, was published in 1946 and did middling sales; a 1957 reissue stuck gold, sold over a million copies, and won Eiseley the Phi Beta Kappa Award for best science work. Books followed every few years thereafter; The Firmament of Time won the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 1960. His memoir, All the Strange Hours (1975) had a valedictory quality about it, as if Eiseley knew his days were running short.

Eiseley was the most-honored Penn faculty member since Franklin; he was awarded thirty-six honorary degrees in his career. After he died, a rough-hewn stone was placed over his grave, bearing a line from one his poems: “ We loved the earth but could not stay.”

Related sites:

The Loren Eiseley Society