Jean Henri Fabre, nineteenth-century French entomologist and author of the massive Souvenirs Entomoligies, has inspired perhaps more modern writer/naturalists than any other chronicler of the natural world. Edwin Way Teale’s selection of the most compelling of Fabre’s writing makes The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre the essential edition of the writer Darwin called “the incomparable observer.“
“The writings of Fabere are classic because they compose an accurate natural history of creatures all around us, written in a vivid personal style that will never grow old or tired.” —E.O. Wilson
“This is beautiful, knowledgeable prose.” —Annie Dillard, from On Nature
“Fabre could write about his discoveries simply and beautifully so that even people who did not understand anything about entomology could appreciate them.” —Gerald Durrell
“What makes Fabre interesting as a writer is his unabashed emotional involvement in the behavior of his subjects. He is no cold, aloof observer, but a man who is at once fascinated and repelled by the gap between human values and reason and the blind, amoral strategies or instinct. His descriptions of how insects conduct their lives read at once as factual natural history and moral parables—but parables modern in their recognition that there are no parallels for human ethics in nature.” —Robert Finch and John Elder, from The Norton Book of Nature Writing