Bacon, Leonard Woolsey (01 January 1830–12 May 1907), minister and author, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Leonard Bacon, a minister, and Lucy Johnson. Bacon graduated from Yale College in 1850. Beginning in September of that year he accompanied his father on a year-long tour of Europe and the East. When he returned to the United States, Bacon spent two years at Andover Theological Seminary and one year at Yale Divinity School, graduating from the latter in 1854. He turned next to medical study and received a degree from Yale Medical School in 1856....
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Bacon, Leonard Woolsey (1830-1907), minister and author
Laura L. Mitchell-Loretan
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Barzun, Jacques (30 November 1907–25 October 2012)
William R. Keylor
Barzun, Jacques (30 November 1907–25 October 2012), historian, essayist, and cultural critic, was born Jacques-Henri-Louis-Roger Barzun in Créteil, near Paris, France, to Henri-Martin and Anne Rose Barzun. His father was a poet who, with other aspiring young writers, had founded a colony of artists called L’Abbaye after the dilapidated house they occupied in the small Parisian suburb. After moving to the nearby town of Passy, the Barzun family hosted a diverse group of musicians, painters, sculptors, and poets—...
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Brown, Sterling Allen (1901-1989), professor of English, poet, and essayist
Robert Stepto
Brown, Sterling Allen (01 May 1901–13 January 1989), professor of English, poet, and essayist, was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Sterling Nelson Brown, a minister and divinity school professor, and Adelaide Allen. After graduating as valedictorian from Dunbar High School in 1918, Brown matriculated at Williams College, where he studied French and English literature and won the Graves Prize for an essay on Molière and Shakespeare. He was graduated from Williams in 1922 with Phi Beta Kappa honors and a Clark fellowship for graduate studies in English at Harvard University. Once at Harvard, Brown studied with Bliss Perry and notably with ...
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Davidson, Donald Grady (1893-1968), author and teacher
Farrell O’Gorman
Davidson, Donald Grady (18 August 1893–25 April 1968), author and teacher, was born in Campbellsville, Tennessee, the son of William Bluford Davidson, a teacher and principal, and Elma Wells. The family followed the father—a cultivated man with a special interest in classical languages and literatures—from one small Tennessee community to another as he directed and taught at various schools. Family ties were close in this region, and the younger Davidson’s mind was shaped not only by his scholarly father but also by his musically talented mother, his maternal grandmother—who lived with the family and told him tales of the Federal occupation of middle Tennessee—and a number of granduncles who were Confederate veterans. Davidson attended several excellent preparatory schools and in 1909 began studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. After one year there, however, he encountered financial difficulties, and left the university to work as a schoolteacher in Cedar Hill and Mooresville, Tennessee, until he had saved enough money to return to Vanderbilt in 1914. He continued to finance his education by teaching English and German at Wallace University School in Nashville even while taking classes. Studying under ...
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Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882), lecturer and author
Joel Myerson
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (25 May 1803–27 April 1882), lecturer and author, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of William Emerson, a Congregational minister, and Ruth Haskins. Ralph was one of eight children. His father was a liberal, Concord-born minister of the First Church in Boston and active in the city’s intellectual and social life, being an editor of the ...
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Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
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Ralph Waldo Emerson. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-98114).
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Franklin, John Hope (2 January 1915–25 March 2009), historian, author, civil rights activist, and public intellectual
Paul Finkelman
Franklin, John Hope (2 January 1915–25 March 2009), historian, author, civil rights activist, and public intellectual, was born in the all-black town of Rentiesville, Oklahoma, the son of Mollie (Parker) Franklin, an elementary school teacher, and Buck Colbert Franklin, an attorney, local postmaster, and store owner who had attended Roger Williams College in Nashville and Atlanta Baptist College (later renamed Morehouse College). Buck Franklin’s father had been a slave owned by members of the Choctaw Nation and served in a United States Colored Troops regiment during the Civil War. When John Hope Franklin was about five years old his father moved to Tulsa, where he opened a law practice. He planned to move his family there in ...
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Herrick, Robert Welch (1868-1938), writer and university professor
Louis J. Budd
Herrick, Robert Welch (26 April 1868–23 December 1938), writer and university professor, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of William Augustus Herrick, an attorney, and Harriet Peabody Emery. Both parents came from long-settled New England families. After growing up in genteel near-poverty, he managed in 1885 to enroll in Harvard University with the help of his uncle ...
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Hoffer, Eric (1902-1983), social philosopher and longshoreman
James T. Baker
Hoffer, Eric (25 July 1902–20 May 1983), social philosopher and longshoreman, was born in the Bronx, New York, the only child of Alsatian immigrants whose names are unknown. He spoke German before he spoke English, and his English was heavily accented. Blinded by a fall when he was nine years old, his eyesight was inexplicably restored when he was fifteen. He never attended school....
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Jackson, John Brinckerhoff (1909-1996), essayist, cultural geographer, and interpreter of the American-built environment
Paul Groth
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff (25 September 1909–28 August 1996), essayist, cultural geographer, and interpreter of the American-built environment, was born in Dinard, France, the son of William Brinckerhoff Jackson, an independently wealthy attorney, and Alice Richardson Jackson, who later became an antiques buyer for Bonwit Teller department store in New York City. John's parents lived near Washington, D.C., and traveled widely. They divorced when he was four, and he then lived in Europe and the New York area with his mother and two siblings by her previous marriage. John's father paid for him to attend the best private boarding schools in the United States and Europe, including drawing classes near Fontainbleau and two years at Le Rosey in Switzerland. John also spent several summers on his uncle Percy Jackson's ranch in Wagon Mound, New Mexico. By his teenage years, John was fluent in French, German, and Spanish, and was adept at sketching as a method of recording built environments....
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Jackson, John Brinckerhoff (1909-1996)
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John Brinckerhoff Jackson. At Berkeley. Photograph by Jennifer Williams, 1981. Courtesy of Paul Groth.
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Kirk, Russell Amos (1918-1994), political theorist, conservative writer, and lecturer
Sarah Katherine Mergel
Kirk, Russell Amos (19 October 1918–29 April 1994), political theorist, conservative writer, and lecturer, was born in Plymouth, Michigan, to Russell Andrew Kirk, a railroad engineer, and Marjorie Pierce Kirk. In his youth Russell spent a good deal of time conversing with his grandfather Frank Pierce, who stimulated his interest in better understanding the world around him. Equally influential to Russell’s intellectual development were his annual summer visits to his mother’s relatives in Mecosta, a small village in central Michigan. Dwelling on the lives of his ancestors, whose portraits donned the walls of his great-grandmother’s home, Russell developed an interest in history, especially connections between the past and the present....
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Miller, Kelly (1863-1939), educator and essayist
Michael R. Winston
Miller, Kelly (18 July 1863–29 December 1939), educator and essayist, was born in Winnsboro, South Carolina, the son of Kelly Miller, a free black who served in the Confederate army, and Elizabeth Roberts, a slave. The sixth of ten children, Miller received his early education in one of the local primary schools established during Reconstruction and later attended the Fairfield Institute in Winnsboro from 1878 to 1880. Awarded a scholarship to Howard University, he completed the Preparatory Department’s three-year curriculum in Latin, Greek, and mathematics in two years (1880–1882), then attended the College Department at Howard from 1882 to 1886....
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More, Paul Elmer (1864-1937), essayist and philosopher
Scott Michaelsen
More, Paul Elmer (12 December 1864–09 March 1937), essayist and philosopher, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Enoch Anson More, a brigadier general during the Civil War and a businessman, and Katharine Hay Elmer. Perhaps rebelling against his father’s rigid Presbyterianism, More studied German Romanticism and Oriental and classical languages and literatures, first at Washington University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in 1887 and an M.A. in 1892, and then at Harvard University, where he received a second M.A. in 1893. He tried university teaching at Bryn Mawr between 1895 and 1897, but the experience was not a happy one for either him or his students. More “retired” from academia at the ripe age of thirty-three, and, in a gesture reminiscent of ...
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O’Conor, John F. X. (1852-1920), clergyman, writer, and educator
Francis F. Burch
O’Conor, John F. X. (01 August 1852–31 January 1920), clergyman, writer, and educator, was born John Francis Xavier O’Conor in New York City, the son of Daniel O’Conor, a builder, and Jane Lake O’Conor. Educated in New York City, he excelled in philosophy and in 1872 won the medal for the natural sciences at St. Francis Xavier College. He graduated with a B.A. that year. On 9 October 1872 he entered the Society of Jesus at Sault au Récollet, Canada. He continued his literary studies at the Jesuit house of studies in Roehampton, England (1874–1876), and pursued philosophy in the Jesuit College at the University of Louvain, Belgium (1876–1879). He began his academic career teaching classical and modern rhetoric and oratory at Manresa, West Park, New York (1879–1881), classical and Anglo-American poetry at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. (1881–1883), and French at Boston College, Boston, Massachusetts (1883–1884). During his theological studies at Woodstock College, Woodstock, Maryland, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest by Archbishop (later Cardinal) ...
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O’Conor, John F. X. (1852-1920)
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John F. X. O’Conor Courtesy of John D. Alexander.
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Royce, Josiah (1855-1916), philosopher and man of letters
John Clendenning
Royce, Josiah (20 November 1855–14 September 1916), philosopher and man of letters, was born in Grass Valley, California, the son of Josiah Royce, Sr., a farmer and salesman, and Sarah Eleanor Bayliss ( Sarah Eleanor Bayliss Royce), a schoolteacher. His English-born parents came to the United States in early childhood. They were married in Rochester, New York, in 1845 and joined the Gold Rush to California in 1849. After much wandering and repeated financial misadventures, the family moved to San Francisco in 1866, where the father became a fruit vendor. Noted for his evangelical piety and considered “a little cracked in the head,” the elder Royce often delivered impromptu sermons on street corners. Royce’s mother, although also “intensely ...
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Smith, Logan Pearsall (1865-1946), essayist, philologist, and critic
Robert L. Gale
Smith, Logan Pearsall (18 October 1865–02 March 1946), essayist, philologist, and critic, was born Lloyd Logan Pearsall Smith in Millville, New Jersey, the son of Robert Pearsall Smith, a wealthy partner in the family glass-bottle factory, and Hannah Whitall Smith. Both parents were Quakers but later became influential revivalist preachers and tract writers. In 1868 the family moved to Philadelphia and in 1872 vacationed in England. Smith’s education was sporadic but excellent: he attended the Friends’ William Penn Charter School, Philadelphia (1880–1881), Haverford College (1881–1884), and Harvard University (1884–1885). In 1885, when he was a guest at his older sister Mary’s wedding ceremony in Oxford, England, he resolved to take classes there eventually. After a year of study at Berlin University and an unhappy year in the family business, he persuaded his father in 1887 to give him enough money so that he could live simply and never have to work again. His father settled $25,000 on him, and he entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1888. That same year his family moved permanently to a country house outside London, where visitors included ...
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Tolson, Melvin Beaunorus (1900-1966), poet, teacher, and essayist
Christopher C. De Santis
Tolson, Melvin Beaunorus (06 February 1900–29 August 1966), poet, teacher, and essayist, was born in Moberly, Missouri, the son of Alonzo Tolson, an itinerant Methodist minister, and Lera Ann Hurt, a seamstress. Some sources list his year of birth as 1898. Although his father’s occupation required frequent moves to various towns in Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas, young Tolson’s childhood was a happy one, relatively unscathed by the various forms of racial prejudice that many African Americans faced during the early twentieth century. After a brief stint at Fisk University following his graduation from high school in 1918, Tolson enrolled in 1919 at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in journalism and theology in 1923. In 1922 he married Ruth Southall, and together they raised four children. Tolson in 1931 entered a graduate program in comparative literature at Columbia University, though he was not overly concerned with the formal aspects of applying for the degree; it was not until 1940 that he was finally awarded the master of arts degree....
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Warner, Charles Dudley (1829-1900), author and editor
Robert L. Gale
Warner, Charles Dudley (12 September 1829–20 October 1900), author and editor, was born in Plainfield, Massachusetts, the son of Justus Warner and Sylvia Hitchcock, farmers. In 1837, three years after her husband died, Sylvia Warner took her two sons to a guardian in Charlemont, Massachusetts, and, in 1841, on to her brother in Cazenovia, New York. Warner attended classes at the Oneida Conference Seminary in Cazenovia, enrolled at Hamilton College, and graduated in 1851 with a B.A. While still a student he published articles in the ...
