Biography

“The newest name after Wells and Verne and Huxley and Orwell is Ernest Callenbach, creator of Ecotopia.” —LOS ANGELES TIMES

Ernest Callenbach is a writer and editor best known for his visionary novel Ecotopia - an environmental classic that has sold almost a million copies. He has also written the novels Ecotopia Emerging and Publisher’s Lunch, and a half dozen nonfiction books on ecological issues. (Click here to see the full list.)

Born and brought up in rural central Pennsylvania, he attended the University of Chicago, where he was caught up in the new wave of serious attention to film as an art. After six months in Paris at the Sorbonne, seeing four films a day, he returned to Chicago and earned a Master’s degree in English and Communications. He then migrated to California and joined the staff of the University of California Press. There he founded and edited the internationally known journal Film Quarterly. He occasionally taught film courses at the University of California, Berkeley, and at San Francisco State University. Concurrently, he edited the UC Press’s world-renowned list of film books as well as books in art and science, including the California Natural History Guides series.

For much of his life he worked only four days a week so that he could spend more time writing and lecturing. He is now retired from the University Press, gardens ardently, has three compost bins, and walks a lot. Click here to see information about his books.