Richard E. Blackwelder  Richard Eliot Blackwelder (January 29, 1909 − January 17, 2001) was an American biologist, professor and author specializing in entomology and taxonomy. After a distinguished professional career, he retired in 1977, and in 1978 he discovered the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, which were to be the focus of his energies for the remainder of his life. Over the next twenty years, Blackwelder amassed a large collection of Tolkien-related books and other materials, which he sorted and indexed. The Blackwelder Collection, donated to Marquette University in 1982, is believed to be the largest single body of secondary sources on Tolkien ever to be developed. Blackwelder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and earned his Ph.D. degree in 1934 from Stanford University. He married Ruth MacCoy in 1935 and from June 1935 – March 1937 collected 50,000 Coleoptera and other insects in the West Indies as a Walter Rathbone Bacon Travelling Scholar for the Smithsonian Institution. He served as Assistant Curator of Entomology at the U.S. National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural History) from 1938–1939 and from 1940–1954 served as Assistant and Associate Curator at the Smithsonian Institution. He was Associate Professor at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York,(1956–1958) for two years before becoming (later in 1958) Professor of Zoology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, a position he held until is retirement in 1977. In 1947, Blackwelder's colleague Waldo L. Schmitt and George W. Wharton established the Society of Systematic Zoology. Blackwelder was actively involved in the Society, serving as Secretary-Treasurer (1948–1959), and becoming its President in 1961. Blackwelder was a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and a Timothy Hopkins Lecturer. In biological taxonomy a monograph is a comprehensive treatment of a taxon. Blackwell's 1943 "Monograph of West Indian Staphylinidae" revised all known species of Staphylinidae (as it was defined at the time, except the largest subfamily, the Aleochorinae, which were simply listed, not revised) from the islands, added newly discovered species, redescribed species, provided synonymies and identification keys and collected together all available information on biology and morphological variations within the group. It remains a classic work of entomology, and is still the standard reference for the region.