With detractors ranging from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to modern-day creationists and advocates of intelligent design, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) is better known as a divisive figure than as a pioneering biologist. This biography rehabilitates Haeckel - focusing on his science and art. It also gives an account of Haeckel's eventful life.

"This is a brilliant book.... It is intellectually brilliant, offering an account of Haeckel as driven by tragic failures in love that colored his view of life. And the book is brilliant scholarship, drawing on a wide range of sources to paint a quite different picture of Haeckel's work than other scholars have achieved." - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences "An excellent, well-illustrated, and scholarly biography of Haeckel." - Andrew Robinson, Financial Times "The Tragic Sense of Life is an immensely impressive work of biography and intellectual history, and a fitting testament to a complex and contradictory character.... Richards succeeds brilliantly in reestablishing Haeckel as a significant scientist and a major figure in the history of evolutionary thought." - P. D. Smith, Times Literary Supplement"