Eleanor Clark (1913–1996) was also the author of two other works of nonfiction, Rome and a Villa and Eyes, Etc., and the novels The Bitter Box, Baldur's Gate, and Camping Out. She was married to Robert Penn Warren.
The Oysters of Locmariaquer is all of a piece, the work of a wanderer, of an insatiably curious mind on the loose.-- -- The New York Times Book Review
What an elegant book this is, starting with that most elegant of creatures, the Belon oyster....[Clark's] fantastic blending of science and art, history and journalism, brings the appetite back for life and literature both. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review, Susan Salter Reynolds, 27 December 1998
[Eleanor Clark] has made a book in which the novelist's gift of identification has merged with the essayist's delight in selection of detail, the traveller's roots and relationships. -- The New Republic
[The Oysters of Locmariaquer] belongs to a class of one....It calls to mind a quickly braided mulitcolored rope in which strands enmesh and enfold and enhance one another in perpetual reappearance. Much wit and patience and all the sense we have went into making this book. -- New York Review of Books