Joseph Wood KrutchBorn 25 Nov 1893; died 22 May 1970 at age 76. American naturalist, conservationist, writer, and critic. His fame began with The Modern Temper (1929), a book in which he described how science replaced religious certainties with rational skepticism, leaving man in a meaningless world. But Krutch later discovered profound meaning in Nature. On doctor's orders, in 1950 he had to leave New York and New England, where he had been teaching, for the dry desert air of the Southwest. In the beauty of the Sonoran Desert, he wrote masterpieces of natural history, including The Voice of the Desert and The Desert Year, (which won the John Burroughs Medal in 1954). Dr. Krutch lived his retirement years in Tucson, Arizona, and was a co-founder of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. |
