An eminent paleontologist with the soul and skill of a poet, Loren
Eiseley (1907-1977) was among the twentieth century's greatest
inheritors of the literary tradition of Henry David Thoreau, Charles
Darwin, and John Muir, and a precursor to such later writers as Stephen
Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Carl Sagan. After decades of fieldwork
and discovery as a "bone-hunter" and professor, Eiseley turned late in
life to the personal essay, and beginning with the surprise million-copy
seller The Immense Journey (1957) he produced an astonishing
succession of books that won acclaim both as science and as art. Now for
the first time, the Library of America presents his landmark essay
collections in a definitive two-volume set.
This second volume begins with The Invisible Pyramid (1970), a
book of meditations on the origins and possible futures of humankind set
against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 landings. As Western civilization
attains new heights of scientific awareness and technological skill, is
it also blind to its own limits, doomed to destroy itself like the lost
civilizations of the ancients or other "spore-bearers" in our
evolutionary past? Eiseley makes an urgent, environmentalist plea in
these essays: we must protect the planet from which we emerged against
our unchecked power to overpopulate and pollute and consume it.
The essays in The Night Country (1971) look not to the stars but
backward and inward: to the haunted spaces of Eiseley's lonely Nebraska
childhood and to those moments, often dark and unexpected, when chance
observations disturb our ordinary understandings of the universe. The
naturalist here seeks neither "salvation in facts" nor solace in wild
places: encountering an old bone, or a nest of wasps, he recognizes what
he calls "the ghostliness of myself," his own mortality, and the
paradoxes of the evolution of consciousness.
Shortly before his death, Eiseley made plans for what would be his last
book, published posthumously as The Star Thrower (1978). Here are
late essays on the life and legacy of Henry David Thoreau, the writer to
whom he turned more often than any other; thoughts on the "two cultures"
he sought to bring together throughout his career; and on the relations
between hard science and "awe before the universe." Of particular
interest are two early stories discovered among his papers, "The Dance
of the Frogs" and "The Fifth Planet."
A companion volume gathers The Immense Journey (1957), The
Firmament of Time (1960), The Unexpected Universe (1969), and a
selection of Eiseley's uncollected prose.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
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