Sally Carrighar

Sally Carrighar (1898–1985) was born Dorothy Wagner before adopting her grandmother's name. An American naturalist and writer, she is known for her series of nature books chronicling the lives of wild animals. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, and partially disfigured at birth with nerve damage by the use of high forceps that also broke her mother's coccyx, she had a difficult childhood. During a time of convalescence for heart disease and depression, she "developed a remarkable communication with birds that came to feed at her windowsill and a mouse living in her radio, and in a flash she realized that she could write about birds and animals."

Life
The use of high forceps during her birth "smashed in" part of her face. It was also a traumatic and painful experience for her mother, who never warmed to the child and was verbally and sometimes physically abusive. "A dozen years later," Carrighar's upper jaw had to be reconstructed.

In childhood, her parents moved to East Cleveland. The family's house backed up to the John D. Rockefeller estate rose gardens. Along her walk to school, Carrighar would pass along other parts of the estate noting the "vistas as lovely as landscape architects could create."

She attended Wellesley College for two years and would have graduated with the class of 1922 but had to leave due to sickness.

Carrighar's work is based on years of observation. She spent seven years observing at Beetle Rock in California and ten years in the Arctic before writing her books. They are considered classics of nature writing and may be viewed as a specialized form of travel literature.

She came to nature writing after a series of disheartening jobs.

One reviewer said of her first book: "There is no false sentiment here, no anthropomorphism—it is sound natural history. Yet only an artist could have succeeded so well." Critics said of her first two books that she was "the most imaginative and poetic nature writer in this country," and "like no one else who has ever written about animals, birds, and insects." She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for general nonfiction in 1948 and again in 1949. These awards supported her projects in Alaska, where she lived for nearly a decade.

Carrighar did not marry or have children. She remained close to her younger brother (and only sibling) and his family.