Halle, Louis Joseph, 1910-1998

Louis Joseph Halle Jr. (17 November 1910, New York City – 13 August 1998, Geneva, Switzerland) was an American naturalist, author, U.S. State Department official, and professor of international studies in Geneva. Halle received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1932. As a young man, he worked for a railway company in Central America and later with a publishing house in New York. For a year, he did graduate study in anthropology at Harvard, then explored boundary rivers between Guatemala and Mexico by mule and dugout canoe. He served in the US Army before World War II and in the Coast Guard during World War II. He was a Latin American specialist employed by the US State Department Policy Planning Staff from the mid-1940s to 1954. From 1954 to 1956 at the University of Virginia, he was a researcher on American foreign policy. He became in 1956 a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. He retired there as professor emeritus in 1973 but remained in Geneva. He was the author of 22 books. In 1941 he received the John Burroughs Medal for Birds Against Men.