A spokesman for the best scientific realism in the fiction and nonfiction of his day, Clarence King, as both conversationalist and writer, was a persuasive influence on many important figures in late nineteenth-century America, including John Hay and Henry Adams. His personality and training gave King an air of charm and erudition that marked him as a symbolic representative of the new and more consciously scientific age. Like Darwin, he was regarded as a man of the new thought and new culture. His presence, even more than his writing, was welcomed everywhere, in the United States and abroad. His friends did not suspect the marriage to a black woman that King kept a secret from the world and even from his closest friends. King seemed to live as a public man only. In his published writings, he succeeded in directing attention away from himself, as if to underscore...