Born in a log cabin in Illinois in 1878, he moved when he was five to his father's homestead in Eddy, Texas. He loved the Hill Country ever since "as a little boy of the blackland cotton prairies, he made a covered wagon trip with his family for a month every summer to camp on the tree-covered hills along the Colorado River" (12). In 1897 he became a student at the University of Texas. At the time U. T. consisted of two buildings, Old Main and B Hall. Bedichek joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity. In his senior year he was editor of the Cactus. He graduated in 1903.

He worked on ranches and taught English in high schools in Houston and San Angelo. In 1908 he homesteaded 320 acres in New Mexico. He married a student he met at U.T., Lillian Greer, in 1910. In 1914 he began working for the University Interscholastic League in the Extension Division on the Little Campus, serving as Director from 1922 to 1948. He shared a love of the Hill Country with two faculty members, Dobie of English, and Webb of History, "Dobie writing of its folklore, Webb of its frontier history, and Bedichek of its birds, its animals and native plantts, and of the way of life of its people" (10). All his books were written at the end of his life. Webb and Dobie arranged for him to spend a year before his retirement writing his first book at Webb's Friday Mountain ranch, about sixteen miles southwest of Austin. That book, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, was published a year later (1947), followed by Karankaway Country (1950), Educational Competition (1956), and The Sense of Smell (1960). The lasts was published after his death in 1959.

In Adventures he describes various kinds of nature writers: "literary scientists, poets, straight-out naturalists, naturalist philosophers, artist-naturalists, ... not to mention literary men and women with only a naturalist's side line" (85). A meticulous naturalist, in the Introduction to his Karankaway Country he acknowledges his debts to Wordsworth by recalling Wordsworth's recommendation to "remember in tranquillity" one's responses to nature. Also, "he gives in the Introduction ... a Wordsworthian glimpse of an experience in his tenth spring, when on his first pony, alone in a meadow at daybreak, he 'became acutely conscious of natural beauty and felt for some moments an elevation which has been repeated with such intensity only at rare intervals since'" (8).

Eleanor James, Roy Bedichek, Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1970.