The Rescue Artist

About the author

Meet Edward Dolnick

EDWARD DOLNICK was born in 1952. “I grew up in a little town called Marblehead, on the ocean about twenty miles north of Boston,” he says. “The town was once home to fishermen and sailors. In the Revolutionary War these sailors turned soldiers had been notorious for their rowdy ways. One group of Marblehead fishermen started a snowball fight that grew into a riot, and it took George Washington himself to break it up. But by my day the small town was just another suburb. Dads wore suits and commuted to work; moms cooked dinner. Somehow I missed most of that. I was a dreamy kid fond of tales of derring-do, preferably in exotic and watery settings.”

Dolnick’s earliest memory of reading and then rereading a book concerns what he dubs “a kind of poor man’s Treasure Island.” That book, Jim Davis, traces the adventures of “a boy who runs off to sea with a gang of thieves and raiders,” says Dolnick. “The tale of smugglers and secret hideaways was perfect for a ten-year-old. Better yet, it actually belonged to my big sister. She had been assigned the book in school and rejected it immediately (‘Pirates!’). This was a hard to beat twofer—an adventure yarn that had been officially deemed suitable only for older readers.”

As a teenager Dolnick fell lastingly under the spell of Moby-Dick. “The strange and tangled language (‘a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard’) and the subversive message were meat and drink for a suburban dreamer marooned in the twentieth century,” he says. “My parents had chosen not to give my sister or me a middle name so that we could eventually pick our own. Now I was ready. Enthralled, and sixteen, I chose: Ishmael.”

‘My parents had chosen not to give my sister or me a middle name so that we could eventually pick our own. Now I was ready. Enthralled, and sixteen, I chose: Ishmael.’

A former chief science writer at the Boston Globe, Dolnick has written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and many other publications. He is the author of Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon.

Asked to share an anecdote about his days as a cub reporter, Dolnick very quickly unpacks the following: “On my very first day as a reporter they announced that year’s Nobel Prize winners. I was working in Boston, and by coincidence one of the winners for medicine happened to be in town giving a lecture. A veteran reporter knocked out a long, complicated story explaining the great man’s breakthrough. My job, I learned with dismay, was to write a ministory providing a glimpse of the winner’s human side. I squeaked out a question about hobbies. Then I retreated to my desk with a nugget of information—our man liked skiing—and labored over my prose. Hours passed. “His hobbies, which include skiing …” Delete. “Skiing, the pastime that…” Delete. Shifts ended; reporters came and went; editors glowered. Hours after deadline I handed over my opus in all its two-sentence glory.”

Asked to describe his writing habits, he opens the curtains on a scene of questionable charm. “I write at home,” he says, “in a cluttered office lined floor to ceiling with file drawers, each bearing a scrawled label (‘most expensive paintings,’ ‘recent thefts’) and bursting with clippings and articles. Closer at hand, concentric stacks of paper encircle my chair. The tallest piles, which contain the most consulted references, form the inner circle. A slightly lower ring is next, followed by another one or two rings in descending order. Lined up precariously near my computer keyboard sit half a dozen cups of tea, fetched and then forgotten at about half-hour intervals throughout the day.

“This sanctum,” he continues, “is off-limits to all visitors with the exceptions of two colossal 125-pound dogs named Blue and Lily. The pure white and immensely friendly Great Pyrenees dogs spend most of their days stretched out like bearskin rugs. At random intervals—when the FedEx man knocks on the door, when a squirrel dares to venture into view, or when an interview subject finally returns my call—they spring to life in a frenzy of barking, toppling stacks of carefully arranged papers in their glee.”

Dolnick has two grown sons and lives with his wife near Washington, D.C.