Loren Eiseley

Loren Eiseley: The Bone Hunter Who Wrote Poetry

He called his method "the concealed essay" — a piece that begins with a man on a beach or a fox in a thicket and ends somewhere in the Pleistocene, having smuggled an argument about evolution past the reader's defences. *Publishers Weekly* called him the modern Thoreau. The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, less inclined to flattery, called him "a Proust miraculously turned into an evolutionary anthropologist." Ray Bradbury simply said he was "every writer's writer, and every human's human."

A House Without Sound

Loren Corey Eiseley was born on 3 September 1907 in Lincoln, Nebraska, on the edge of town, in a family arranged for loneliness. His father Clyde was a hardware salesman who worked long hours and, in his spare time, an amateur Shakespearean actor — the source, Eiseley believed, of his own love of beautiful language. His mother, Daisey Corey, was a self-taught prairie artist who had been deaf since childhood and whose erratic behaviour estranged her son and soured the marriage.

The isolation pushed him outdoors, into the caves and creek banks around Lincoln, and indoors, into books. A half-brother, Leo, gave him a copy of *Robinson Crusoe* and taught him to read; he became a compulsive user of the public library. After high school, unsettled by his home and by his father's death, he dropped out and took menial work.

Freight Trains

In 1927 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and left for the western desert to recover. What followed was the formative interruption of his life: during the Depression he rode freight trains as a drifter, living among the dispossessed. Most academics acquire their sense of geological time from textbooks. Eiseley acquired his while sleeping rough in country that was mostly rock.

He came back to the University of Nebraska, wrote for and eventually edited the *Prairie Schooner*, published poetry and short stories, and joined the archaeological digs run out of Morrill Hall, leading expeditions into western Nebraska and the southwest after fossils and artefacts. He took a B.A. in 1933 — his degree work spanned English on one side and geology and anthropology on the other, which turned out to be the whole shape of his career. He went to the University of Pennsylvania for an M.A. in 1935 and a Ph.D. in 1937, with a dissertation on "Three Indices of Quaternary Time and Their Bearing Upon Pre-History: a Critique."

The Academic

He taught at the University of Kansas from 1937, including anatomy to pre-medical students during the war, then headed the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oberlin from 1944 to 1947. In 1947 he moved to Pennsylvania as department head and curator of the Early Man section of the University Museum, a curatorship he held for thirty years. He was elected president of the American Institute of Human Paleontology in 1949 and served as provost of the university from 1959 to 1961.

Then something unusual happened: rather than lose him, Pennsylvania created a special interdisciplinary chair for him in 1961, and he finished his life as Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science. He was, by one count, the most honoured member of the university since Franklin himself.

The Immense Journey

*The Immense Journey* appeared in 1957 and made him famous. A collection of essays on human origins and evolution, it sold over a million copies and was translated into at least sixteen languages — figures that do not ordinarily attach to books by curators of Early Man. *Darwin's Century* followed in 1958, subtitled "Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It," tracing the idea from the seventeenth-century Great Chain of Being to the challenges of his own day; it won the Phi Beta Kappa prize for the best science book. *The Firmament of Time* (1960) took the 1961 John Burroughs Medal for nature writing.

*The Unexpected Universe* (1969) is where his central conviction is clearest: that evolution's explanations remain incomplete, that human beings are largely ignorant of their own origins, and that a mechanistic science cut off from human values is impoverished. *The Invisible Pyramid* (1971), written after the moon landing, turned the same eye on inner and outer space. *The Night Country* (1971) collected autobiographical essays, and *All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life* (1975) was his memoir, opening with a description of himself as a sickly afterthought. He published poetry too — *Another Kind of Autumn* in 1977. The posthumous collection *The Star Thrower* (1978) contained the piece Bradbury said "changed my life."

The Mysterious Mr X

Not everything landed. *Darwin and the Mysterious Mr X* (1979) argued for the significance of Edward Blyth in the development of natural selection, and specialists were unpersuaded: Stephen Jay Gould and Michael Ruse both disputed the conclusions, Ruse remarking that he would give it a failing grade. Colleagues often found him hard to place. One friend told him: "You are a freak — you don't stay in the hole where God supposedly put you."

He died of cardiac arrest following surgery at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital on 9 July 1977, aged 69.

Why Loren Is Called a Genius

The specific quality is a form of double vision: the capacity to hold a technical fact and its human meaning in the same sentence without falsifying either. The "concealed essay" was his own name for the technique, and it is a real invention rather than a mannerism. He would open with something small and observed — a beach, a bird, a skull in a drawer — and let the scale expand until the reader was standing in deep time before noticing the journey. The critic Orville Prescott described a scientist writing with "poetic sensibility and fine sense of wonder"; W. H. Auden read him as exploring "Man as the Quest Hero." Dobzhansky's "a Proust miraculously turned into an evolutionary anthropologist" is the sharpest of these, because Proust is a claim about the architecture of memory, not just about pretty prose. Richard Wentz caught the working method: Eiseley thought the contemplative naturalist needed time "to observe, to speculate, and to dream."

The counter-case should not be softened. Eiseley made no significant discovery and proposed no theory that survives in evolutionary biology or anthropology; his one substantial venture into revisionism, the Blyth thesis, was judged a failure by Gould and Ruse. Thirty-six honorary degrees in twenty years measure public esteem, not scientific contribution. His genius, if the word applies, is literary and synthetic rather than investigative — he bridged the chasm between science, natural history and poetry when almost nobody was attempting it. That is a real and unusual gift. It is not the same as advancing the science, and he never pretended otherwise.

Legacy

He belongs to a line running from the eighteenth-century British naturalists through Thoreau, and he demonstrated that serious science could reach a mass readership without being diluted into it. His honours included the Bradford Washburn Award from the Boston Museum of Science in 1976 for contribution to public understanding of science, and the Joseph Wood Krutch Medal the same year; he was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His wife tried to destroy the personal notebooks he had kept since 1953; his friend Kenneth Heuer reassembled them, and *The Lost Notebooks* appeared in 1987, full of vagabond sketches, unfinished novels and letters to Auden, Lewis Mumford and Bradbury. Nebraska put him in its Hall of Fame in 1986 and named a Lincoln library after him. In 2007 the state declared a centennial year in his name.

Achievements

• John Burroughs Medal — 1961
• Held posts at University of Pennsylvania