Robert A. Dahl

ROBERT A. DAHL (1915 - 2014) was a world-renowned scholar of democratic theory who served for many years as Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. At the age of 10, he moved with his family from a small town on the plains of northwestern Iowa to Skagway, Alaska, nestled between the mountains at the northernmost end of the Inside Passage. Beginning in his early teens and continuing for the next two decades, he explored the wilderness outside his front door with his two brothers whenever he was not in school, working on the docks, or maintaining the tracks of the White Pass Railroad. He cherished his memories of growing up in Alaska for his entire life, and he wrote Adrift at Sea, Lost on Land at the age of 85 as a testimony to the land and sea that he loved so much.