Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos ed. by William Cronon (review)

In his oblique autobiography, All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life (1975), Loren Eiseley remarked, "I was born in the central plains, compacted out of glacial dust and winter cold." The sentence reveals an imagination shaped by midwestern geography and awareness of deep time, two qualities that marked all of his writing, from youthful poems to scientific articles on paleontology to groundbreaking personal essays. Forty years after his death, those essays have earned him a well-deserved place in the Library of America, in twin volumes skillfully edited by environmental historian William Cronon.

Eiseley grew up in eastern Nebraska, the only child of a father who never managed to secure a steady income as a salesman, and a mother who was deaf, silent, and mentally ill. "We were Americans of the middle border," he observed, "where the East was forgotten and the one great western road no longer crawled with wagons." The wagons had stopped rolling west not that long before Eiseley's birth in 1907. As a boy, he saw the wheel ruts from their passage in the shortgrass prairie. His paternal grandfather had immigrated from Germany and homesteaded in Nebraska during the waning years of the frontier, an era memorialized by Eiseley's fellow Nebraskans Mari Sandoz in Old Jules (1935) and Willa Cather in O, Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918). The narrator whom we meet in his essays shares something of the loneliness and stoicism of the characters in those novels, isolated souls dwarfed by the seemingly endless plains, battered by harsh winds and weathers, resigned to nature's vast indifference.

The oppressive silence of his childhood home drove Eiseley outdoors, where he roved about the prairie, much of it still unplowed, and along the river corridors and rugged uplands. Although his family moved frequently as his father sought work, Eiseley spent most of his youth in and around Lincoln, where he studied fossils at the State Museum and earned a degree in anthropology and sociology at the University of Nebraska. His undergraduate career stretched over eight years, for it was often interrupted by illness, including a bout of tuberculosis; by his wanderlust, which prompted him to shag rides on the railroads, in the company of hobos and drifters; and by his father's agonizing death from cancer, which left Eiseley, at age twenty-one, as the sole breadwinner for his mother and an unmarried aunt.

When he came upon that aunt burning his father's letters, Eiseley was able to read, on one of the smoldering fragments, "Remember, the boy is a genius, but moody." It proved to be a fair assessment. Both moodiness and genius began to show in the poems and stories Eiseley contributed to Prairie Schooner, a literary magazine founded at the University of Nebraska while he was a student there. Its declared mission was to explore the culture of Nebraska and more broadly of the Middle West. Although the magazine would later expand its reach to embrace writers and subjects from across the nation, during the ten years Eiseley spent as an editor and frequent contributor, it was a vital gathering place for writing from and about the Great Plains.

In the early 1930s, while still an undergraduate, he worked several summers on field expeditions for the State Museum, hunting for fossils in the badlands of western Nebraska—an arid country of buttes, scarps, arroyos, and blowing dust. The area preserved a record of North America's natural history stretching back millions of years, along with stone points and spearheads dating back over 10,000 years, among the earliest human artifacts on the continent. The leavings of extinct species and vanished tribes impressed on the young researcher a visceral sense of the evolutionary process, the "constant emergent novelty in nature" that cast up new creatures and cultures even as old ones disappeared.

Leaving the sparsely settled badlands, where...