Edwin R. Willis

Edwin R. Willis, also cited as Edwin Roy Willis, was an American entomologist born in 1911 and died in 1987. Available records connect him especially with research on cockroaches and related questions in insect ecology and behavior.

He is known as the co-author, with Louis M. Roth, of works including The Biotic Associations of Cockroaches and The Medical and Veterinary Importance of Cockroaches. Those books helped document how cockroaches live, interact with other organisms, and matter in both natural history and public health.

There also appears to have been a more personal side to his writing: library records list My life, a skeleton biography, an autobiographical work. While detailed biographical information is limited in the sources I could confirm here, the record that does survive shows a writer-scientist whose specialty was unusually focused and whose work still circulates among readers of entomology and natural history.