Gerald Durrell

Born in British India in 1925, Durrell moved to England after his father's death, then spent four years of his childhood on Corfu before the war drove the family back. A 1946 inheritance funded animal-collecting trips to the Cameroons and British Guiana; his wife pushed him to write about the first journey, and The Overloaded Ark sold well enough to launch a writing career. My Family and Other Animals, published in 1956 after an expedition to Argentina and Paraguay, became a bestseller. By the late 1950s he'd shifted focus: he leased land on Jersey in 1959 and opened a zoo built for captive breeding and study, not spectacle, handing control to the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust in 1963. The institution lurched toward bankruptcy repeatedly; he kept it alive through books and appeals, finally securing the property outright in 1970. An alcoholic, he divorced his first wife in 1979 and remarried Lee McGeorge, an American zoologist; together they made television documentaries and co-authored The Amateur Naturalist, which sold over a million copies. He founded the Durrell Conservation Academy in 1984 to train others in breeding practice. Diagnosed with liver cance