The Origin of Species (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Darwin [260]
Eiseley, Loren. Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958. A lively, readable, and yet scholarly account of the development of the idea of evolution throughout the nineteenth century.
Ellegard, Alvar. Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859-1872. With a new foreword by D. L. Hull. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. A thorough presentation of the response to Darwin’s theory in the first fourteen years after the publication of Origin.
Gillespie, Neal C. Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. An important discussion of Darwin’s thought in relation to religion.
Gruber, Howard. Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity. New York: Dutton, 1974. A study of the psychological forces involved in scientific creativity, focusing on two years in which Darwin formulated his theory.
Huxley, T. H. Darwiniana. London: Macmillan, 1893. A fascinating collection of essays about Darwin’s thought, written by Darwin’s primary defender in the years immediately following the publication of Origin.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers. New York: Atheneum, 1962. One of the first serious studies of Darwin as a creative writer.
Keynes, Randal. Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002.
Kohn, David, ed. The Darwinian Heritage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. A valuable collection of essays by distinguished scholars on almost all aspects of Darwin studies.
Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. A study of the way Darwin’s thought and language permeated nineteenth-century narrative.
Miller, Jonathan, and Borin Van Loon. Darwin for Beginners. New York: Pantheon, 1982. A surprisingly solid (and amusing) introduction to Darwin’s thought in a quasi—comic book format.
Moore, James R. The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870—1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. An important scholarly reconsideration and revision of the common assumption that Darwin’s thought met prolonged resistance from Protestantism.
Oldroyd, D. R. Darwinian Impacts: An Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980. An excellent and clear summary of the basic ideas and problems of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Peckham, Morse, ed. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959. A compendium of all the changes in the six editions of Origin.
Ruse, Michael. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. An important discussion of Darwin’s thought in the context of the scientific debates between 1830 and 1875, charting the scientific community’s conversion to Darwin’s ideas.
Stevenson, Lionel. Darwin Among the Poets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932. A study of the ways in which Darwin’s thought appears in the work of nineteenth-century poets.
Stott, Rebecca. Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. A stunning, novelistic study of the eight years Darwin worked on barnacles in preparation for his great work, giving an intense microbiography of Darwin during that time.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications. London: Macmillan, 1912. The codiscoverer of natural selection writes richly on Darwinian (and Wallacean) ideas,