Teale, Edwin Way

Teale, Edwin Way

(1899–1980) naturalist, author; born in Joliet, Ill. The only child of a railroad mechanic, his lifelong interest in natural history grew out of childhood summers on his grandfather's northern Indiana farm. He graduated from Earlham College in 1922 and was a staff writer for Popular Science magazine from 1928 to 1941. His first nature book, Grassroots Jungles, appeared in 1937 and he helped promote an appreciation of the environment long before it became a cause. Wandering through Winter, the final volume in his natural history of the four seasons in America, won a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction in 1965.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.