Remington was born to Pardon Sheldon and Maud Remington in
Reedville, Virginia, on January 19, 1922. His family then moved to
St. Louis, Missouri. He grew up collecting butterflies with his father. He did his undergraduate studies at
Principia College, where he received a
B.S. in 1943. During his military service in
World War II, he served as a
medical entomologist, throughout the Pacific, researching insect-borne diseases and
centipede bites in the
Philippines. After the war, Remington studied for his doctorate at Harvard. He founded the Lepidopterists' Society with
Harry Clench and his first wife Jeanne Remington, mother of his three children. Remington also started a friendship with
Vladimir Nabokov who was a keen amateur butterfly collector. For the academic year 1958–59, Remington was a Guggenheim fellow at Oxford University. In the 1960s he proposed that there were geographic regions which he called
suture zones where species tended to hybridize with close relatives. He died on May 31, 2007, at age 85, in
Hamden, Connecticut. ==References==