Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907 – July 9, 1977) was an American anthropologist, educator, philosopher, and natural science writer, who taught and published books from the 1950s through the 1970s. During this period he received more than 36 honorary degrees and was a fellow of many distinguished professional societies. At his death, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

He was noted as a “scholar and writer of imagination and grace,” which gained him a reputation and record of accomplishment far beyond the campus where he taught for 30 years. Publishers Weekly referred to him as "the modern Thoreau." The broad scope of his many writings considered such diverse topics as the mind of Sir Francis Bacon, the prehistoric origins of man, and the contributions of Charles Darwin.

Eiseley’s national reputation was established mainly through his books, including The Immense Journey (1957), Darwin's Century (1958), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country (1971), and his memoir, All the Strange Hours (1975). Science author Orville Prescott praised him as a scientist who “can write with poetic sensibility and with a fine sense of wonder and of reverence before the mysteries of life and nature.“ Naturalist author Mary Ellen Pitts saw his combination of literary and nature writings as his "quest, not simply for bringing together science and literature... but a continuation of what the 18th and 19th century British naturalists and Thoreau had done."

According to his obituary in the New York Times, the feeling and philosophical motivation of the entire body of Dr. Eiseley’s work was best expressed in one of his essays, The Enchanted Glass: “The anthropologist wrote of the need for the contemplative naturalist, a man who, in a less frenzied era, had time to observe, to speculate, and to dream.” Shortly before his death, he received an award from the Boston Museum of Science for his “outstanding contribution to the public understanding of science” and another from the U.S. Humane Society for his “significant contribution for the improvement of life and environment in this country.”

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Eiseley lived his childhood with a hardworking father and deaf mother who suffered from possible mental illness. Their home was located on the outskirts of town, where, as author Naomi Brill writes, it was "removed from the people and the community from which they felt set apart through poverty and family misfortune." His autobiography, All the Strange Hours, begins with his "childhood experiences as a sickly afterthought, weighed down by the loveless union of his parents."

His father, Clyde, was a hardware salesman who worked long hours for little pay, writes Brill. However, as an amateur Shakespearian actor, he was able to give his son a "love for beautiful language and writing." His mother was a self taught prairie artist who was considered a beautiful woman, but had lost her hearing in childhood. Her deafness often gave rise to irrational and destructive behavior which left Eiseley feeling distant from her, and which contributed to his parents' unhappy marriage.

Living at the edge of town, however, led to Eiseley's early interest in the natural world, to which he turned when being at home was too difficult. There, he would play in the caves and creek banks nearby. Fortunately, there were others who opened the door to a happier life. His half - brother, Leo, for instance, gave him a copy of Robinson Crusoe with which he taught himself to read. Thereafter, he managed to find ways to get to the public library and became a voracious reader.

Eiseley later attended the Lincoln Public Schools; in high school, he wrote that he wanted to be a nature writer. He would later describe the lands around Lincoln as "flat and grass - covered and smiling so serenely up at the sun that they seemed forever youthful, untouched by mind or time — a sunlit, timeless prairie over which nothing passed but antelope or wandering bird." But, disturbed by his home situation and the illness and recent death of his father, he dropped out of school and worked at menial jobs.

Eiseley eventually enrolled in the University of Nebraska, where he wrote for the newly formed journal, Prairie Schooner, and went on archeology digs for the natural history Museum. In 1927, however, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and left the university to move to the western desert, believing the drier air would improve his condition. While there, he soon became restless and unhappy, which led him to hoboing around the country by hopping on freight trains (as many did during the Great Depression). Professor of religion, Dr. Richard Wentz, writes about this period: "Loren Eiseley had been a drifter in his youth. From the plains of Nebraska he had wandered across the American West. Sometimes sickly, at other times testing his strength with that curious band of roving exiles who searched the land above the rippling railroad ties, he explored his soul as he sought to touch the distant past. He became a naturalist and a bone hunter because something about the landscape had linked his mind to the birth and death of life itself.

Eiseley eventually returned to the University of Nebraska and received a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Bachelor of Science in Geology / Anthropology. While at university, he served as editor of the literary magazine "The Prairie Schooner," publishing his poetry and short stories. Undergraduate expeditions to western Nebraska and the southwest to hunt for fossils and human artifacts provided the inspiration for much of his very early work. He later noted that he came to anthropology from paleontology, preferring to leave human burial sites undisturbed unless destruction threatened them.

Eiseley received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1937 and wrote his dissertation entitled Three Indices of Quaternary Time and Their Bearing Upon Pre - History: a Critique, which launched his academic career. He began teaching at the University of Kansas that same year. During World War II, Eiseley taught anatomy to reservist pre-med students at Kansas.

In 1944 he left the University of Kansas to assume the role of head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oberlin College in Ohio. In 1947 he returned to the University of Pennsylvania to head its Anthropology Department. He was elected president of the American Institute of Human Paleontology in 1949. From 1959 to 1961, he was provost at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1961 the University of Pennsylvania created a special interdisciplinary chairmanship for him.

Dr. Eiseley was also a fellow of many distinguished professional societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society.

At the time of his death in 1977, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science, and the curator of the Early Man section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. He had received thirty - six honorary degrees over a period of twenty years, and was the most honored member of the University of Pennsylvania since Benjamin Franklin. In 1976 he won the Bradford Washburn Award of the Boston Museum of Science for his "outstanding contribution to the public understanding of science" and the Joseph Wood Krutch Medal from the Humane Society of the United States for his "significant contribution for the improvement of life and the environment in this country."

In addition to his scientific and academic work, in the mid 1940s Eiseley began to publish the essays which brought him to the attention of a wider audience. Anthropologist Pat Shipman writes, "the words that flowed from his pen... the images and insights he revealed, the genius of the man as a writer, outweigh his social disability. The words were what kept him in various honored posts; the words were what caused the students to flock to his often aborted courses; the words were what earned him esteemed lectureships and prizes. His contemporaries failed to see the duality of the man, confusing the deep, wise voice of Eiseley's writings with his own personal voice. He was a natural fugitive, a fox at the wood's edge (in his own metaphor)..."

In an interview on National Public Radio (NPR), author Michael Lind said, "Before the rise of a self - conscious intelligentsia, most educated people – as well as the unlettered majority – spent most of their time in the countryside or, if they lived in cities, were a few blocks away from farmland or wilderness... At the risk of sounding countercultural, I suspect that thinkers who live in sealed, air - conditioned boxes and work by artificial light (I am one) are as unnatural as apes in cages at zoos. Naturalists like Eiseley in that sense are the most normal human beings to be found among intellectuals, because they spend a lot of time outdoors and know the names of the plants and animals they see... For all of his scientific erudition, Eiseley has a poetic, even cinematic, imagination."

Dr. Richard Wentz describes what he feels are the significance and purposes of Eiseley's writings: "For Loren Eiseley, writing itself becomes a form of contemplation. Contemplation is a kind of human activity in which the mind, spirit and body are directed in solitude toward some other. Scholars and critics have not yet taken the full measure of contemplation as an art that is related to the purpose of all scholarly activity – to see things as they really are... Using narrative, parable and exposition, Eiseley has the uncanny ability to make us feel that we are accompanying him on a journey into the very heart of the universe. Whether he is explicating history or commenting on the ideas of a philosopher, a scientist or a theologian, he takes us with him on a personal visit."

However, because of Eiseley's intense and poetic writing style, and his focus on nature and cosmology, he was not accepted or understood by most of his colleagues. "You," a friend told him, "are a freak, you know. A God - damned freak, and life is never going to be easy for you. You like scholarship, but the scholars, some of them, anyhow, are not going to like you because you don’t stay in the hole where God supposedly put you. You keep sticking your head out and looking around. In a university that’s inadvisable."

His first book, The Immense Journey, was a collection of writings about the history of humanity, and the rare science book that appealed to a mass audience. It has sold over a million copies and has been published in at least 16 languages.

Author Orville Prescott wrote, "Consider the case of Loren Eiseley, author of The Immense Journey, who can sit on a mountain slope beside a prairie - dog town and imagine himself back in the dawn of the Age of mammals eighty million years ago: 'There by a tree root I could almost make him out, that shabby little Paleocene rat, eternal tramp and world wanderer, father of all mankind.' ... his prose is often lyrically beautiful, something that considerable reading in the works of anthropologists had not led me to expect. ... The subjects discussed here include the human ancestral tree, water and its significance to life, the mysteries of cellular life, 'the secret and remote abysses' of the sea, the riddle of why human beings alone among living creatures have brains capable of abstract thought and are far superior to their mere needs for survival, the reasons why Dr. Eiseley is convinced that there are no men or man - like animals on other planets, ...".

He offers an example of Eiseley's style: "There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains — if anything contains — the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves."

According to naturalist author Mary Ellen Pitts, in the "seminal" Darwin's Century, Eiseley was studying the history of evolutionary thinking, and he came to see that "as a result of scientific studies, nature has become externalized, particularized, mechanized, separated from the human and fragmented, reduced to conflict without consideration of cooperation, confined to reductionist and positivist study." The results for humankind, "as part of the 'biota' – Eiseley's concern as a writer – are far reaching." In the book, his unique impact as a thinker and a literary figure emerges as he reexamines science and the way man understands science. She concludes that "Nature," for Eiseley, "emerges as a metonym for a view of the physical world, of the 'biota,' and of humankind that must be reexamined if life is to survive."

The book won the Phi Beta Kappa prize for best book in science in 1958.

Discussing the book, Professor of Zoology, Leslie Dunn wrote, "How can man of 1960, burdened with the knowledge of the world external to him, and with the consciousness that scientific knowledge is attained through continually interfering with nature, 'bear his part' and gain the hope and confidence to live in the new world to which natural science has given birth? ... The answer comes in the eloquent, moving central essay of his new book." The New Yorker wrote, "Dr. Eiseley describes with zest and admiration the giant steps that have led man, in a scant three hundred years, to grasp the nature of his extraordinary past and to substitute a natural world for a world of divine creation and intervention... An irresistible inducement to partake of the almost forgotten excitements of reflection." And the review in The Chicago Tribune, added, "[This book] has a warm feeling for all natural phenomena; it has a rapport with man and his world and his problems; ... it has hope and belief. And it has the beauty of prose that characterizes Eiseley’s philosophical moods."

It was awarded the 1961 John Burroughs Medal for the best publication in the field of Nature Writing.

Poet W.H. Auden wrote, "The main theme of The Unexpected Universe is Man as the Quest Hero, the wanderer, the voyager, the seeker after adventure, knowledge, power, meaning, and righteousness." He quotes from the book:
"Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war... Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember or has gotten wrong... Bereft of instinct, he must search continually for meanings... Man was a reader before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe."

Loren Eiseley died on July 9, 1977, and was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Eiseley's wife, Mabel Langdon Eiseley, died on July 27, 1986, and is buried next to him, in the Westlawn section of the cemetery, in Lot 366. The inscription on their headstone reads, "We loved the earth but could not stay", which is a line from his poem The Little Treasures.

A library in the Lincoln City Libraries public library system is named after Eiseley.

Loren Eiseley was awarded the Distinguished Nebraskan Award and inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. A bust of his likeness resides in the Nebraska State Capitol.

On October 25, 2007, the Governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, officially declared that year "The Centennial Year of Loren Eiseley." In a written proclamation, he encouraged all Nebraskans "to read Loren Eisely's writings and to appreciate in those writings the richness and beauty of his language, his ability to depict the long, slow passage of time and the meaning of the past in the present, his portrayal of the relationships among all living things and his concern for the future."