( A Book of Hours contains 24 essays, one for each hour o...)
A Book of Hours contains 24 essays, one for each hour of the day, that seek to bridge the gap between definitive scientific philosophy and the sheer unadulterated beauty that Donald Culross Peattie envisioned within everyday life. The Boston Transcript referred to this collection as science, in sheer poetry,” and the Chicago Daily Tribune mused that it leaves one a better man for having read it” and offers the inevitableness of natural laws and the truth of beauty, if one cares to seek it.”
https://www.amazon.com/Hours-Donald-Culross-Peattie-Library/dp/1595341587?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1595341587
( A Gathering of Birds is an anthology containing selecte...)
A Gathering of Birds is an anthology containing selected prose about birds by nineteen famous authors, such as Hudson, Audubon, and Thoreau, and includes brief biographical information about each. The New York Times called the collection a delightful gathering’ that Mr. Peattie has presented, and his own contributions to the book make it something new and valuable in this field.”
https://www.amazon.com/Gathering-Birds-Anthology-Ornithological-Prose/dp/1595341625?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1595341625
( An Almanac for Moderns contains a short essay for each ...)
An Almanac for Moderns contains a short essay for each day of the year that contemplates a unique but factual aspect of unbridled nature. According to a review in Nation, this collection of essays manages to appeal to the ordinary lover of nature . . . but the turn of Peattie’s mind is poetic and speculative.” The New York Times calls this book a fine and subtle perception . . . rising at times to an intense lyric beauty . . . a book which the reader will deeply treasure, and to which he will repeatedly return.”
https://www.amazon.com/Almanac-Moderns-Culross-Peattie-Library/dp/1595341560?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1595341560
( "A volume for a lifetime" is how The New Yorker describ...)
"A volume for a lifetime" is how The New Yorker described the first of Donald Culross Peatie's two books about American trees published in the 1950s. In this one-volume edition, modern readers are introduced to one of the best nature writers of the last century. As we read Peattie's eloquent and entertaining accounts of American trees, we catch glimpses of our country's history and past daily life that no textbook could ever illuminate so vividly. Here you'll learn about everything from how a species was discovered to the part it played in our country’s history. Pioneers often stabled an animal in the hollow heart of an old sycamore, and the whole family might live there until they could build a log cabin. The tuliptree, the tallest native hardwood, is easier to work than most softwood trees; Daniel Boone carved a sixty-foot canoe from one tree to carry his family from Kentucky into Spanish territory. In the days before the Revolution, the British and the colonists waged an undeclared war over New England's white pines, which made the best tall masts for fighting ships. It's fascinating to learn about the commercial uses of various woods -- for paper, fine furniture, fence posts, matchsticks, house framing, airplane wings, and dozens of other preplastic uses. But we cannot read this book without the occasional lump in our throats. The American elm was still alive when Peattie wrote, but as we read his account today we can see what caused its demise. Audubon's portrait of a pair of loving passenger pigeons in an American beech is considered by many to be his greatest painting. It certainly touched the poet in Donald Culross Peattie as he depicted the extinction of the passenger pigeon when the beech forest was destroyed. A Natural History of North American Trees gives us a picture of life in America from its earliest days to the middle of the last century. The information is always interesting, though often heartbreaking. While Peattie looks for the better side of man's nature, he reports sorrowfully on the greed and waste that have doomed so much of America's virgin forest.
https://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-American-Culross-Peattie/dp/1595341668?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1595341668
Donald Culross Peattie was born on June 21, 1898 in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, United States. He was the son of Robert Burns Peattie, who worked on the Chicago Tribune, and of Elia Amanda Wilkinson, a literary critic and novelist. He grew up in Windsor Park, a Chicago suburb on the South Shore, surrounded by books and Pre-Raphaelite furnishings. The home was always full of guests, conversation, and laughter.
Donald Culross Peattie was a delicate child who had difficulties in Chicago schools, so his mother took him to Tryon, in the Great Smokies of western North Carolina. Away from books and with little companionship, he had time to become interested in nature. In the summer of 1913 Peattie joined his brother and three other college boys in a hiking tour of England and France. He subsequently attended the University of Chicago (1916 - 1918), majoring in French. Donald Culross Peattie spent the summer of 1919 on the southern Appalachian Trail, and entered Harvard that fall. Peattie received the B. A. in 1922.
Encouraged by his family, Peattie began to write. With his future wife he set type for his first work, Blown Leaves (1916), at University High School. After his freshman year at University, Peattie tried reporting, but quit after two weeks on the Tribune. Meanwhile, his "scrawny and bronchitic body" had been rejected for military service. When his parents moved to New York City in 1918, Peattie joined them and became a reader for the publisher George H. Doran. The inside view of bookmaking that he obtained was invaluable later, but he was miserable as a sideliner in wartime and uncertain of his career. He took refuge in the stimulating city's culture and in lone bird-watching walks and botanizing. A visit to the Bronx Botanical Garden, where the staff encouraged him to use the herbarium, led Peattie to quit his job and start training to be a scientific botanist.
In 1922 - 1924 Donald worked under David Fairchild in the Bureau of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction in Washington, D. C.
After his Cargoes and Harvest (1926), an economic botany, the Peatties collaborated on three books. In 1924, Peattie left the routines of plant identification and distribution to become a freelance writer. He had a column on the seasons in the Washington Star in 1925 - 1934 (briefly revived in the Chicago Daily News). He wrote the biographies of many naturalists for the Dictionary of American Biography, and numerous magazine articles. But his life was darkened by sickness and debt. Peattie's first scientific work was Flora of the Tryon Region (1928 - 1931). In 1928 his wife's mother provided the couple with the money to escape to Paris. Their daughter sickened on shipboard and died soon after they reached Paris. The Peatties gradually recovered from this shock on the Riviera, first at Vence, then at Nice, and finally at Menton. Here they both wrote fiction, his wife more successfully, including Sons of the Martian (1932), Port of Call (1932), and A Wife to Caliban (1934).
By the time their money ran out, late in 1933, Peattie had disciplined his imagination and acquired a world-historical perspective. His impressionistic history of Vence (1930) was republished in America as Immortal Village (1945). The American edition borrowed from the Peatties' summary of their European years, The Happy Kingdom (1935). After returning from France, Peattie lived in Illinois. Through the Field Museum, which had published his scientific study of the Indiana dunes, Flora of the Indiana Dunes (1930), he obtained potboiler assignments. In the spring of 1934 he started what became Almanac for Moderns (1935) on the pattern of his newspaper column. Next came Green Laurels (1936), a collection of lives of naturalists; A Book of Hours (1937), and A Prairie Grove (1938), an "ecological novel" repeating the pattern of his Vence study and using his wife's family archives.
Peattie received Guggenheim fellowships during 1936 - 1938, to do a study of Robert Owen's community at New Harmony, Ind. The results appeared in the Reader's Digest (November 1942) and in a chapter of Journey into America (1943). By this time he had established a wide readership for his mixture of history, biography, and description of nature. In 1937 the Peatties moved to Santa Barbara, California. Already a frequent contributor to the Reader's Digest, Peattie became its roving editor in 1943. In the last decade of his life he suffered general deterioration from liver dysfunction and diabetes, which affected the spontaneity of his style. His wife bore an increasing share of the burden of his work, for their marriage was an unusually close partnership. Only two of his projected four volumes on the trees of North America appeared (1948, 1950), and no major works were published after The Rainbow Book of Nature (1957), for children.
Peattie's style, sometimes turgid, sentimental, and vague, at best joined the humanism of the artist with the precision of the scientist. His forte was to evoke the locality in depth and the person in brief, fitting ideas, feelings, and the natural and historical environment into a compact essay. Donald Culross Peattie died on November 16, 1964.
Donald Culross Peattie was a distinguished nature writer and author. His most notable books were Trees You Want to Know (1934), The Road of a Naturalist (1941), American Heartwood (1949), A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (1950) and A Natural History of Western Trees (1953). He also was a roving editor for Reader's Digest, writing dozens of articles for it and other magazines.
( A Book of Hours contains 24 essays, one for each hour o...)
( A Gathering of Birds is an anthology containing selecte...)
( "A volume for a lifetime" is how The New Yorker describ...)
( An Almanac for Moderns contains a short essay for each ...)
Peattie was an advocate for protecting the Indiana Dunes.
Quotations:
"I work with the facts and lift them where they sing. "
"Life is a phenomenon sui generis, a primal fact in its own right, like energy. Cut flesh or wood how you like, hack at them in a baffled fury — you cannot find life itself, you can only see what it built out of the lifeless dust. "
"The earth holds a silver treasure, cupped between ocean bed and tenting sky. Forever the heavens spend it, in the showers that refresh our temperate lands, the torrents that sluice the tropics. Every suckling root absorbs it, the very soil drains it down; the rivers run unceasing to the sea, the mountains yield it endlessly… Yet none is lost; in vast convection our water is returned, from soil to sky, and sky to soil, and back gain, to fall as pure as blessing. There was never less; there could never be more. A mighty mercy on which life depends, for all its glittering shifts, water is constant. "
"What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place. "
Quotes from others about the person
Joseph Wood Krutch described Donald Culross Peattie as "perhaps the most widely read of all contemporary American nature writers" during his heyday.
On May 22, 1923, Donald Culross Peattie married Louise Heegaard Redfield. They had four children.
