Every Living Thing

Jason Roberts was the child of two actors, growing up in a countercultural family that traveled often, spending time in both California and Hawaii. After attending the University of California, Santa Cruz, he moved to Silicon Valley and took an engineering job at Apple. For about a decade, Roberts worked in technology and in freelance writing about technology, founding a company in the early days of the internet that focused on instructional guides for common activities and skills. After selling the company, he began to focus more on writing, publishing A Sense of the World in 2006, a biography of the blind explorer James Holman. He published his next book, Every Living Thing, in 2024, and it went on to receive the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Roberts lives in Oakland, California, with his partner, journalist Julia Scott.

The events of Every Living Thing take place near the end of the Age of Enlightenment, a period of time in Western Europe that emphasized the value of reason and led to more systematic ways of conducting science according to the scientific method. This new age led to advancements in a variety of fields, from the mathematical achievements of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to the philosophical insights of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. One of the outcomes of these new ideas was the American Revolution in 1776, which happened near the end of Linnaeus and Buffon’s lives. The American Revolution was partly inspired by European philosophical ideas, and in turn, it helped inspire the French Revolution, one of the most significant turning points in European history. The French Revolution represented the end of the monarchy in France, but the absence of a monarch eventually led to a power vacuum, clearing the way for the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Linnean system of binomial nomenclature (naming organisms by genus and species) survives into the present day, although each generation of scientists following Linnaeus has refined and expanded upon the system in order to reflect new breakthroughs in biology.

Every Living Thing was one of the major biographies to come out in 2024. Its competition for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography that year was John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg and The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker by Amy Reading, both of which focus on more recent history. Many famous science texts gets referenced in Every Living Thing. In addition to the works by the book’s subjects, Linnaeus and Buffon, some of the most important books are Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton, which helped establish the field of calculus and was a major influence on both Linnaeus and Buffon; Le Règne Animal by George Cuvier, which expanded on the taxonomic ideas of Linnaeus and Buffon to categorize the animal kingdom; and On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, which is one of the most influential books in science history, presenting a theory of evolution that draws on the ideas of Linnaeus and especially Buffon. Of the many sources Roberts draws on for this book, one of the more frequent ones is Stephen Jay Gould, a scientist and public figure who wrote several popular books about evolution in the late 20th century, including The Mismeasure of Man, a book arguing against the type of scientific racism that stems in part from Linnaeus’s work.