Trained as an anthropologist and paleontologist, Loren Corey Eiseley (1907-1977) became one of the foremost essayists of his generation to interpret science for the layman.

Of Scots-English and German pioneering stock, Loren Corey Eiseley was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on September 3, 1907. His father, Clyde Edwin Eiseley, had been an itinerant semi-professional actor in his youth and later worked as a hardware salesman. His mother, Daisy Corey, had artistic ambitions and was a painter of some talent. These interests undoubtedly influenced Eiseley's literary sensibilities. A far more significant aspect of his childhood, however, was his mother's deafness and her paranoid, neurotic behavior which led to marital tensions and conflicts. The strangeness of his home life and frequent moves in and around Lincoln caused young Eiseley to have, to a large extent, an isolated, lonely childhood. The fugitive-outsider imagery that is found in his work resulted, in part, from this...