BOY NATURALIST
“Be a hunter and explorer.” This is the advice, says world-renowned entomologist E.O. Wilson in his 1994 autobiography, Naturalist, that he gives to his science students. “If you have the will, there is a discipline in which you can succeed.”
Wilson should know. A native of Alabama, the fiercely intelligent, Pulitzer Prize–winning scientist has lived a dream by following a passion—one that he discovered at the ripe old age of 7.
As he explains in his autobiography, it began with a hunt for monsters. It was the summer of 1936, and young Wilson was living at Paradise Beach, a small settlement on the east shore of Florida’s Perdido Bay, near Pensacola. One day, while standing in the shallows, he), and he spent hours studying it.
