…We were simply shunned as unimportant and odd” ( The Night Country).Īs a child, Eiseley gradually withdrew into a world of nature and books, reading authors such as Jack London and accompanying his uncle on trips to the State Museum. Eiseley later described it as a “house of gestures.” He notes: “We never had visitors, no minister ever called on us so the curtains were never raised. The frame house on Lincoln’s South Street had an earthen cellar and the parlor was dark to keep out the intrusions of the outside world. His parents’ marriage was unhappy Eiseley best communicated with his mother through hand signals, lip movements and thumping on the floor to create vibrations. The son of a “Willie Lohman” salesman and an untaught prairie artist who was deaf, Eiseley grew up in modest economic circumstances in the Lincoln area. Finally, through some strange mental osmosis these extinct fragmented creatures merged with and became part of my own identity” ( The Invisible Pyramid).

Its remnants lay openly about me in arroyos, the teetering, eroded pinnacles of Toadstool Park, or farther North in the dinosaur beds of Wyoming.

…To me, time was never a textbook abstraction. “I… was born on the Great Plains and was drawn almost mesmerically into its rougher margins, the Wild Cat Hills and the Badlands, where bone hunting was a way of life. But his Nebraska years were a well upon which he drew for his literary works. He would go on to hold faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania, write 16 books, and receive more than 35 honorary degrees and awards before his death in 1977. He studied anthropology and paleontology at the University of Nebraska, wrote for the Prairie Schooner and hunted for bones in the Wildcat Hills with the State Museum’s South Party. Eiseley may even prove to be a modern shaman as he calls for us to remember our roots and seek our “sacred center” in nature.īorn in 1907, Eiseley’s childhood was spent exploring the streets and storm sewers of Lincoln and the prairie grasses and wildflowers of the surrounding countryside. Now, more than ever, his message about humankind’s relationship to the environment is relevant in light of global warming, pollution, population growth, and resource depletion. Many of Eiseley’s stories in the books that won him international fame originated with experience he laid away in his early years in Nebraska. Loren Eiseley once likened the brain of a writer to an attic that stores pictures from the past-pictures that are later recalled and woven into story. (Loren Eiseley Society/University of Pennsylvania Archives) South Party group picture, from left: Bert Schultz, Mylan Stout, Emery Blue, Robert Long, Loren Eiseley, Eugene Vanderpool, Frank Crabill.

Loren Eiseley by Loren Eiseley