American · 1919–2007
Peter Tompkins (1919–2007) was an American journalist, wartime spy and bestselling author, born in Athens, Georgia, and raised partly in Italy. During the Second World War he served with the Office of Strategic Services and was smuggled into German-occupied Rome, where he ran an intelligence network and radioed reports to the Allies ahead of the Anzio landings, an experience he recounted in A Spy in Rome. After the war he worked as a correspondent and turned to books on ancient mysteries and unorthodox science. Secrets of the Great Pyramid (1971) and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids (1976) explored the mathematics and legends of monumental architecture, while The Secret Life of Plants (1973), written with Christopher Bird, became an international bestseller with its claims that plants respond to music and human emotion. Secrets of the Soil (1989), again with Bird, carried those ideas into agriculture. Scientists rejected much of his work, but it found a large and lasting popular readership. He died in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.