Bibliographies

Recommended Biographies of Naturalists and/or Nature Writers

Here is the list of suggestions I received in response to my query requesting titles of exemplary biographies of naturalists or nature writers.  Thank you to those of you who generously sent suggestions with annotations.

Pamela Banting

Curt Meine's full, traditional, really fascinating bio of Aldo Leopold. And the
book by Stanley Cavell on Thoreau--which is maybe not truly a bio, but you'd
have to decide, certainly it's not a traditional bio----I haven't read it for some time so can't quite remember how much bio is in it--but anyway it is moving and brilliant.  --Ann

These are not full length biographies, but the reference book American Nature
Writers has considerable biographical material on many nature writers.  The editor is John Elder.  I think this book would also list any full-length biographies for its authors.  --Judy

Your request give me a good excuse to praise David Backes' recent biography of Minnesota ecologist and wilderness writer, Sigurd F. Olson.  The books is called A Wilderness Within: The Life of Sigurd F. Olson (U of Minnesota Press,
1997). I don't know how to categorize it, but it's simply the most inspiring biography of a naturalist I've read in years, and about one nature writer who should have been included in John Elder's American Nature Writers reference work! --Thomas

Josephine Herbst's New Green World (Hastings House, 1954), about the eighteenth century "Philadelphia naturalists," John & William Bartram, might be
the sort of thing you're looking for. There's an edition of the Bartrams' writings, edited by H. G. Cruikshank, that came out in 1957. --Alison Murie

We had a query like this on the Environmental Life-Writing list (a.k.a. the ELF-
list) a while ago - I'll re-post my own contribution to that, with a few additions suggested by other folks (and things I've thought of since). (By the way, if anyone's interested in finding out more about the ELF-list, write me at holmes@fas.harvard.edu).

People's overall favorites seemed to be Curt Meine's Aldo Leopold: Life and
Work, and Linda Lear's Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. Also mentioned were Robert D. Richardson's Emerson: A Mind on Fire, and Susan Flader's Thinking Like a Mountain (intellectual development of Leopold).

Some more specifically methodologically-experimental pieces:

1. Curt Meine, "Wallage Stegner: Geobiographer," in Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision (1997) - discusses Stegner's way of doing place-based biography, generalized to a concept of "geobiography"

2. Louise Chawla, In the First Country of Places: Nature, Poetry, and
Childhood Memory (1994) - Chawla is primarily a developmental and environmental psychologist, and has written extensively about children's relationship with nature (in journal articles, esp. in Children's  Environments Quarterly). In her book,  though, she looks at the ways that the memories of childhood (esp. childhood environmental experience) are used in adult life, particularly in the works and philosophies of 5 20th-c. American poets.

3. Steve Holmes, The Young John Muir (with a theoretical appendix, "Theoretical Frameworks for Environmental Biography") (1999) - The appendix gives my own integration of a lot of theoretical resources (psychology, humanistic geography, religious studies, etc., with a lot of references given) for tracking the development of an individual's environmental experience. The book itself, a bio of Muir up to age 33, exemplifies the approach, with more theoretical discussion in the Intro and footnotes.

[If you get into the psychological stuff, you might also want to look at Richard
Lebeaux's two volumes on Thoreau, which utilize an Eriksonian developmental
perspective, and/or Melvin Kalfus' Frederick Law Olmsted (not a nature writer
but close), which is more psychoanalytic, esp. object-relations theory. I use both the Eriksonian and the object-relations approaches, in my own work.]

4. Thomas Slaughter, The Natures of John and William Bartram (1996) - Very interesting discussions of how images and understandings of nature served to shape and express various facets of the Bartrams' self-identities and relationships with each other - and, conversely, how the psychological and family dynamics shaped their images of and actions toward nature. To be sure, some people find it a bit un-chronological, and at times annoyingly self-referential. Neither of those parts bother me, though.

5. Donald Culross Peattie's bio of Audubon (1935) - I'm not sure I'd actually recommend it as a model, but an interesting case of a biographer (who was himself a nature writer) inserting his own values and visions into the life of his subject. The idealization is certainly overdone, and the gender presumptions are dangerous and misleading, all of it perhaps telling us more about Peattie and his times than about Audubon and his; but at least an attempt to take a  subject's emotional, intellectual, and practical relationship with nature as the center of the narrative/interpetation. 

There's also Evelyn Fox Keller's study of the geneticist Babara McClintock, A
Feeling for the Organism, which stresses McClintock's relationship to mainstream science and her "unorthodox" research techniques. You may also be interested in Marcia Bonta's Women in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists, or the volume The Challenge of Feminist Biography, ed. Sara Alpern.

Steven J. Holmes