September 3, 1907. Born in the bleak farm country of Lincoln, Nebraska, the only child of Clyde, a traveling salesman, and Daisy Corey Eiseley. "I was a child of the early century, American man, if the term may still be tolerated. A creature molded of plains' dust and the seed of those who came west with the wagons."¹

"Born ... in the wrong time, the wrong place, and into the wrong family. I am not insensible of the paradox: It is this which made me."²

"I lived, like most American boys of that section, in a small house where the uncemented cellar occasionally filled with water and the parlor was kept shuttered in a perpetual cool darkness. We never had visitors. No minister ever called on us, so the curtains were never raised. We were, in a sense, social outcasts. We were not bad people nor did we belong to a...