Loren Corey Eiseley (1907--1977) and the construction of a mythic modern hero

Loren Corey Eiseley studied anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and received his doctorate in 1937. After brief teaching stints at the University of Kansas and Oberlin College, Eiseley returned to Penn in 1947 as chairman of the Anthropology Department. Eiseley served as chair of Anthropology until 1959 when he became Provost of Penn, a post he held from 1959 to 1961. Although Eiseley wrote a few scholarly publications in his field of anthropology, his major scholarly work is in the history of science, Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (1958). However, it is not Eiseley's scholarship that earns him such national acclaim in the 1960s and 1970s; it is the popular essays he wrote and published both individually and in collections that brought him fame and notoriety and eventually got him elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1971. The major essay collections are The Immense Journey (1957), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Invisible Pyramid (1970), The Night Country (1971), and All the Strange Hours (1975). Various studies have been made of Eiseley's style and use of personae. However, it is the mythologization of himself as the principal hero of the essays/stories that is the subject of this study. Joseph Campbell's stages of the life of the hero and the hero adventure are used in analyzing the heroic qualities with which Eiseley embellishes himself and his life. In addition to the five major essays collections named above, the author has also analyzed Eiseley's presentation of himself in The Firmament of Time (1960). Because of the harsh scholarly criticism he received in response to this volume, it is a turning point for him and his writing career. Although Eiseley also published collections of poems and several works were published posthumously, the author has focused on the six collections named above and Eiseley's presentation of himself in each collection as an epic hero.