Guy Murchie

Guy Murchie (Jr.) (25 January 1907 – 8 July 1997) was a writer about science and philosophy: aviation, astronomy, biology, and the meaning of life. He was, successively, a world traveler; a war correspondent; a photographer, staff artist, and reporter for the Chicago Tribune; a pilot and flight instructor; a teacher; a lecturer; an aerial navigator; a building contractor; and founder and director of a summer camp for children. He was a practising member of the Bahá'í Faith. His books included Men on the Horizon (1932), Song of the Sky (1954), Music of the Spheres (1961), and The Seven Mysteries of Life (1978). The latter three books were chosen for promotion by the Book of the Month Club. He illustrated his books with etchings and woodcuts of his own design.

Murchie was the son of Ethel A. Murchie—who designed the interior of a seaplane for Sikorksy Aircraft—and Guy Murchie, Sr.: a graduate of Harvard Law School, a former member of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, a U.S. Marshall, and a prominent Boston attorney who at one time served as attorney to Winston Churchill. Sitting President Theodore Roosevelt and his wife attended Guy Jr.'s christening. His parents held him to high standards.

Murchie, who as an adult stood 6'6" tall and weighed 225 lbs., was raised as an Episcopalian, attended Kent School—which at the time was just "for boys"—and graduated from Harvard in 1929. But from this heritage of privilege and physical capacity he instead turned to traveling and making his own way, never to return to the arena of Bostonian privilege. Instead he left before receiving his credentials on a trip headed to the Far East. Murchie returned to the States in 1930. From the experience, he gained a deep-seated appreciation for the basic commonality of humanity across any divide of culture, and in 1932 he published his first book (with his own illustrations)—Men on the Horizon—in Boston and London, dedicating it to his mother. In the same year he married Eleanor Forrester Parker Cushman, who was some 26 years his senior. Although the marriage eventually failed, Murchie dedicated his book The Seven Mysteries of Life to her after her death in 1960.

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