BIOGRAPHY
DAVID RAINS WALLACE
Wallace was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1945 and grew up in New England. He attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut (B.A. cum laude 1967) and Mills College in Oakland, California (M.A. with honors 1974). He lives in California with his wife,.... more
BIOGRAPHY
DAVID RAINS WALLACE
Wallace was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1945 and grew up in New England. He attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut (B.A. cum laude 1967) and Mills College in Oakland, California (M.A. with honors 1974). He lives in California with his wife, the painter Elizabeth Kendall.
Wallace’s first published writing on natural history and conservation appeared in Clear Creek Magazine in 1970. Since then he has published over twenty books, and his work has appeared in many anthologies and periodicals, including The Norton Anthology of Nature Writing, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Examiner, Zyzzyva, Harpers, Mother Jones, Greenpeace, Sierra, Wilderness, Country Journal, Backpacker, and Bay Nature.
Wallace received the 1984 John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing for his third book, The Klamath Knot: Explorations in Myth and Evolution, which also won a 1984 Commonwealth Club of California Silver Medal for Literature. The San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Tribune included it in their lists of the best books of 1983. In 1999, the Chronicle included The Klamath Knot in its list of the twentieth century’s 100 best non-fiction books west of the Rockies. The eminent botanist, G. Ledyard Stebbins, called it “a classic of natural history which will take its place alongside Walden and A Sand County Almanac.”
Other awards include a 1979 Commonwealth Club Silver Medal for his first book, The Dark Range: A Naturalist’s Night Notebook, Ohioana Library Association Medals for Literature for Idle Weeds in 1981 and Bulow Hammock in 1990, and a 2012 Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for his nineteenth book, Chuckwalla Land: The Riddle of California’s Desert.
Wallace received a U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1979, and a Fulbright Foundation Creative Writing Fellowship in 1990. The Fulbright was awarded to research a book on the Costa Rican National Parks, published in 1992 as The Quetzal and the Macaw. Biologist Daniel Janzen called it “a major contribution to tropical conservation.” Another book on Central American natural history, The Monkey’s Bridge, was a New York Times Notable Book for 1997.
Wallace’s other books include two novels, The Turquoise Dragon (1985) and The Vermilion Parrot (1991); the companion volume to a National Audubon Society-PBS film series, Life in the Balance (1987); and a 1986 essay collection, The Untamed Garden. He has worked as a writer for numerous organizations, including the Columbus Ohio Metro Parks, the Nature Conservancy, the Oakland Museum, the Sierra Club, the National Geographic Society, the U.S. National Park Service, and the California State Parks Foundation. The Wildlife Conservation Society employed him to write an ecotourism guide to Central America, published as Adventuring in Central America (1995). Other conservation related publications include official Park Service handbooks to Redwood, Yellowstone, Mammoth Cave, and New River Gorge national parks.
His recent books are: The Bonehunters’ Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age (1999), a finalist for a 2000 PEN West book award; Beasts of Eden: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution (2004), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year ; Neptune’s Ark: From Ichthyosaurs to Orcas (2007); Chuckwalla Land (2011); Articulate Earth: Adventures in Ecocriticism (2013); Mountains and Marshes: Exploring Bay Area Natural History (2015); and Shakespeare’s Wilderness (2017). He most recently contributed an essay, “Redwood Time,” to the Save the Redwoods League’s 100th anniversary anthology, The Once and Future Forest (2018).
Wallace has taught, lectured, or read at many colleges, including the University of California as an instructor at the Berkeley Extension from 1988 to 1992: Ohio State University in Columbus as a visiting lecturer in Spring 1993; and Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, as the Fall 2008 Headley Distinguished Visitor in Residence.