Surprisingly for a future scientist, he had no headįor math but excelled in his English courses. Left on his own, Eiseley became an avid reader and a wanderer through Leaving Loren in the hands of his mother, Daisy, who was losing both her But Clyde worked long hours inĪ succession of low-paying jobs, including store clerk and traveling salesman, Only a fleeting presence in young Loren’s life). To the younger of his two sons (the other son, from a previous marriage, was His father, Clyde, hadĬommitted long passages of the Bard’s plays to memory and enjoyed reciting them For the growingīoy, it was often either Shakespeare or silence. German stock on his father’s side, Anglo-Saxon on his mother’s. Human condition-and occasionally the universe’s condition. The other hand, few other practitioners of anthropology and its kinfolkĪrchaeology and paleontology have used them so effectively to comment on the You won’t find his name attached to any great discoveries made in the field. Line suburb where he lived while teaching at Penn.ĭifferent Eiseley emerges from reminiscences by his friends and colleagues: aĬase of arrested development who was never fully comfortable in the roles thatĪ college professor is supposed to play. Pigeons in downtown Manhattan, or coexisting with mice in Wynnewood, the Main

West, marveling at the impressions left on stone by ancient rainfall, watching Material almost anywhere and anyhow: while hopping freights in the American They depict a human sponge who could soak up literary Scintillating essays, which the Library of America has collected and publishedĪs a two-volume set.

Hours: The Excavation of a Life (1975) he also revealed himself in his Too bad we don’t have bootleg tapes of the back-and-forth between two eminences with so much to talk about.Įiseley not only wrote an autobiography of his own, All the Strange They must have made quite a contrast: on one side of the table, McHarg, the ebullient, Scottish-born landscape architect and stalwart of the 20th-century environmental movement on the other side, Eiseley, the reserved Nebraskan who taught anthropology but thought of himself as an evolutionist and resented his fellow scientists’ disdain for those who, like him, wrote primarily for the lay reader. In his autobiography, A Quest for Life, Ian McHarg reports having lunched with Loren Eiseley G’35 Gr’37 once or twice a year during their overlapping time on the Penn faculty-from the late 1950s to the late ’70s. Loren Eiseley was associated with no great discoveries in his field of anthropology, “awkwardly shy” and “not very comfortable with students” in the classroom, a disaster as Penn’s provost-and a writer of unmatched brilliance on the natural world and the human condition.īy Dennis Drabelle | Photos courtesy Penn Archives

Loren Eiseley by Loren Eiseley