A Gorilla in the Guest-room Study Guide

Gerald Durrell, who was born to British parents on January 7, 1925, in Jamshedpur, India, was a renowned British naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, and author. He’s remembered for both his influential work in wildlife conservation and his many funny and irreverent novels. Durrell spent his childhood in Corfu, Greece, where his family moved in 1935. His experiences in Corfu later became the subject of his first highly successful book My Family and Other Animals (1956). The novel is autobiographical and contains a mix of serious reflections on conservation and hilarious stories about Durrell’s interactions with all the “animals” around him. After returning to England due to the onset of World War II, Durrell began working at a pet store and later at a zoo. He hated how most zoos were oriented toward only public entertainment rather than conservation, which led him to envision a new way to help animals. This vision materialized in 1958 when he founded the Jersey Zoological Park (now Durrell Wildlife Park) in the Channel Islands. Gerald Durrell passed away on January 30, 1995, leaving behind a flourishing zoo.

“A Gorilla in the Guest Room” is set in the mid-20th century. The period in which the author lived was characterized by rapid advancements in science and technology. With these discoveries came a growing awareness of environmental decline, animal welfare, and conservation. The story—like much of Durrell’s body of work—reflects the changes in people’s attitudes to animals and nature during this era. In a world recovering from World War II, there was a significant shift in how people viewed animal welfare. There began to be public recognition on a broader scale than ever before of the importance of conservation, species protection, and the need to understand and protect natural habitats. This was partially due to globalization following the war and also due to the rise of wildlife documentaries. These brought distant lands and the animals who lived there closer to the public's imagination and made animal issues a household topic. Durrell added to this by portraying human-animal relationships with empathy and humor, emphasizing the need for the compassionate and respectful treatment of animals.

Conservationists, scientists, and literary critics responded positively to Durrell’s work. His legacy of gentle humor and scientific preciseness in conservational writing is an important one. Works of natural history that think about the relationship between humans and animals owe a great deal to Durrell, such as Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape, which offers scientific insights into animal and human behavior. The subject matter and the autobiographical elements in Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man are also notably similar to Durrell's work. Goodall was another staunch conservationist, and this book provides a firsthand account of her groundbreaking studies on chimpanzees. “A Gorilla in the Guest Room” and many of Durrell’s other stories share the common thread with Goodall’s work of studying and explaining the lives of apes and their environments with intention and respect. The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson—written in the same year, although more focused on environmentalism and ecological warnings—also resonates with Durrell’s conservationist ideas of preserving the world we live in. Finally, several of the other stories in Durrell’s collection Menagerie Manor deal with very similar topics, each giving animals and humans equal attention.