Author Description

"One of the last of the gentleman-naturalists, Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-American author of Lolita and other enduring works of fiction, had no formal training in biology, but during the 1940s was an acknowledged expert on Blues, a diverse group of butterflies inhabiting some of the remotest parts of Latin America. In 1945, while serving as curator at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, he published a radical new classification of Blues, a paper that initially caused a stir in the rarified field of lepidoptery."--BOOK JACKET. "It was nearly fifty years before scientists followed up on his pioneering work, with a series of expeditions to the high Andes of South America. What they found led not only to new thinking about Nabokov's place in science, but to fresh insights on the global movement of species and the threat of their extinction."--BOOK JACKET. "Part biography of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, and part scientific detective story, Nabokoy's Blues explores the rich and varied place butterflies hold in Nabokov's fiction, as well as far-reaching questions of biogeography and evolution, and the worldwide crisis in ecology and biodiversity."--BOOK JACKET.