Teale's works serve as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930–1980.

Teale taught at Friends from 1922–1924 and served as men's and women's debate coach, yearbook adviser and chairman of the campus Peace Contest.

In New York, Teale spent 13 years in his first full-time writing job, as a staff writer for Popular Science, working on a wide variety of assignments.

The book was followed by three others on the North American seasons: Journey Into Summer, Autumn Across America, and Wandering Through Winter, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1966.

Teale worked as a co-writer for a segment titled "Vernal Equinox" on the March 20, 1955 episode of Omnibus, a TV-Radio Workshop of the Ford Foundation produced by Robert Saudek and hosted by Alistair Cooke on the CBS Television Network.

[9] Teale became president of the Thoreau Society in 1958, the same year that Autumn Across America was presented to the White House Library.

Situated next to the Natchaug State Forest, Trail Wood is now managed as a nature preserve by the Connecticut Audubon Society.

In 1980 while working with author Ann Zwinger on the book A Conscious Stillness: Two Naturalists on Thoreau's Rivers, Teale died.