Biography of Percival Lowell
1935
Percival Lowell saw things other astronomers could not. In the late 19th century, he pointed his telescope at Mars and became convinced the red planet was threaded with artificial canals built by a dying civilization desperately signaling across the void. The scientific establishment dismissed him as a fantasist, but Lowell did not waver. He founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and spent his life searching for a trans-Neptunian planet he called Planet X, a search that would outlast him by decades. Yet Lowell was not simply a man possessed by one grand obsession. He spent years in Japan, immersing himself in the language and Esoteric Shinto, producing work that scholars still cite. Written by his brother A. Lawrence Lowell, who had access to private letters and intimate knowledge, this biography draws an indelible portrait of a brilliant, difficult, and endlessly fascinating man whose imagination was as much his greatest gift as it was his most dangerous flaw. For anyone curious about the eccentric geniuses who push science forward, and sometimes pull it into the abyss.
