Arts and Letters

Donald Culross Peattie was born in Chicago on June 21, 1898. He received his A.B. degree from the University of Illinois, did graduate work in science at Harvard, and was for some years occupied with various literary and scientific enterprises without quite finding himself. Then, after five years spent on the French Riviera, he settled down for three years on a square mile of Illinois land, without, so he said, ever "leaving it overnight." One result was that in 1935, at the age of thirty-seven, he published An Almanac for Moderns, which catapulted him into fame. It consisted of a collection of meditations, one for each day of the year, and all dealing with some aspect of the relation of man to the natural world.

Ever since Thoreau's posthumous reputation established "nature writing" as a recognized department of American literature, the public has tended to single out some living practitioner of the genre as its Representative Man in the field. John Muir and John Burroughs occupied this position in their time, and by some sort of general consent Mr. Peattie succeeded them.

With Thoreau, Muir, and Burroughs he shared many of the same characteristics and attitudes which they shared with one another, especially the conviction that man is indeed part of a whole larger than himself; that contact with other aspects of this whole is a source of strength and joy; and that he dissociates himself from it at his peril.

On the other hand, Mr. Peattie was, like each of the others, also a unique personality with a unique temperament. None of the others—Thoreau least of all—could be called scientists in any strict technical sense. And though Mr. Peattie was, like each of the others, a poet in both the general and the specific sense of the word—he had, indeed, early won a prize for a volume of verse—it was a part of his contemporaneity that he had a background of science which protected him against the charge sometimes made against other writers that he was a merely sentimental "nature lover." One might, so he demonstrated, know nature as a scientist and at the same time see beyond one sort of fact into the wonder and beauty which are facts of a different kind.

Mr. Peattie was a voluminous writer and in addition to a shelfful of books wrote many scientific as well as many popular articles—a number of the latter enjoying the enormous audience guaranteed by the Reader's Digest of which he was, up to the time of his death on November 16th of last year, one of the "Roving Editors."

Though An Almanac for Moderns remains probably his best and most widely read book, several of the others will be remembered, especially Green Laurels (1936); and Flowering Earth (1939). The first of these consists of biographical essays on a gathering of the leading naturalists of the past; the second with botany, which was the division of natural history to which he had devoted himself especially.