Ascoli, Max (25 June 1898–01 January 1978), political philosopher, editor, and publisher, was born in Ferrara, Italy, the son of Enrico Ascoli, a coal merchant, and Adriana Finzi. Despite serious problems with his eyesight, which were to plague him much of his life, Ascoli earned his LL.D. at the University of Ferrara in 1920 and his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Rome in 1928. His first book, a study of the radical French thinker and writer Georges Sorel, appeared in 1921. An opponent of fascism from its beginnings, Ascoli wrote articles for ...
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Article
Ascoli, Max (1898-1978), political philosopher, editor, and publisher
Martin K. Doudna
Article
Brownson, Orestes Augustus (1803-1876), educator and philosopher
David Hoeveler
Brownson, Orestes Augustus (16 September 1803–17 April 1876), educator and philosopher, was born in Stockbridge, Vermont, the son of Sylvester Augustus Brownson and Relief Metcalf, farmers. His father died when Brownson was two, and he was placed with a nearby family. The couple reared him in strict Calvinist Congregationalism. At fourteen he rejoined his mother and twin sister in Ballston Spa in upstate New York, where he studied briefly in an academy before going to work in a printer’s office. He had no more formal education. In 1827 he married Sally Healy of Elbridge, New York; they had eight children....
Article
Carus, Paul (1852-1919), editor, author, and philosopher
Charles S. Prebish
Carus, Paul (18 July 1852–11 February 1919), editor, author, and philosopher, was born in Ilsenburg, Germany, the son of Dr. Gustav Carus, the first superintendent-general of the Church of Eastern and Western Prussia, and Laura Krueger. As the son of a well-known theologian and state church official, Carus was afforded an appropriate Gymnasium education, which focused on mathematics and the classics. He studied at the Universities of Greifswald, Strasbourg, and Tübingen, eventually earning his Ph.D. degree from Tübingen in 1876. His first professional position was as an educator at the military academy in Dresden, an appointment he soon resigned because of conflicts over his liberal religious views. He then lived briefly in England (1881–1884) before traveling to the United States and settling in LaSalle, Illinois, where he lived for the remainder of his life....
Article
Croly, David Goodman (1829-1889), journalist and social thinker
David W. Levy
Croly, David Goodman (03 November 1829–29 April 1889), journalist and social thinker, was born in County Cork, Ireland, the son of Patrick Croly and Elizabeth (maiden name unknown), Irish Protestants; the family moved to New York City when David was an infant. Although a poor man, Croly’s father collected books and read widely in history, theology, and letters. As a youth David served an apprenticeship to a silversmith but found his real pleasure in reading, thinking, writing, and debating. He attended New York University (then called the University of the City of New York) for a year, receiving a “special diploma” in 1854. In 1855 he became a reporter for the ...
Article
Croly, Herbert David (1869-1930), political philosopher and editor
David W. Levy
Croly, Herbert David (23 January 1869–17 May 1930), political philosopher and editor, was born in New York City, the son of David Goodman Croly and Jane Cunningham (Jane C. Croly), two famous journalists. His mother was a widely read writer on women’s topics. His father was an experienced newspaperman, a writer of unorthodox views, and a follower of the French thinker Auguste Comte. From early childhood Herbert received instruction from his father, who was surely the chief influence in his life. No doubt growing up in a home of such intense intellectual activity predisposed Croly to a life of reading, thinking, and writing....
Article
Eiseley, Loren Corey (1907-1977), anthropologist, writer, and philosopher of science
William R. Stott III
Eiseley, Loren Corey (03 September 1907–09 July 1977), anthropologist, writer, and philosopher of science, was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the only son of Clyde Edwin Eiseley, an amateur actor turned hardware salesman, and Daisey Corey, a self-educated artist. The family’s financial instability and his mother’s handicap (she was deaf and, as he later wrote, “always on the brink of mental collapse”) made his formative years in Nebraska a time of profound isolation. For solace, he turned to the Nebraska prairie and its fauna. He enrolled in the University of Nebraska in 1925, but physical and psychological crises kept him from graduating until eight years later. Near the end of his life, he recalled dropping out of college at least three times—to work in a poultry hatchery, to recuperate from tuberculosis in Colorado and the Mojave Desert (1928–1929), and to drift, riding the rails in the West (1930–1931). His father’s death in 1928 brought Eiseley to the brink of mental collapse. During this period, however, he worked on his first archaeological dig, published his first poetry, and cultivated a deep affinity for animals and landscape. In the same year he finished college (1933) Eiseley went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate work in anthropology. He earned his Ph.D. in 1937, completing a dissertation titled “Three Indices of Quaternary Time and Their Bearing upon Pre-History: A Critique.” With this work an intensely private man began an unexpected career as a prominent public intellectual and literary naturalist....
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Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
In
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-98114).
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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 ...
Article
Hildreth, Richard (1807-1865), journalist, antislavery activist, philosopher, and historian
Lynn Gordon Hughes
Hildreth, Richard (28 June 1807–11 July 1865), journalist, antislavery activist, philosopher, and historian, was born in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the son of Hosea Hildreth, a Congregational (later Unitarian) minister and educator, and Sarah McLeod Hildreth. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where his father was professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. After graduating from Harvard in 1826, he spent a year teaching school in Concord, Massachusetts. This experience inspired his earliest historical writing, ...
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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....
Article
Lamont, Corliss (28 March 1902–26 April 1995), writer and philosopher
Ann T. Keene
Lamont, Corliss (28 March 1902–26 April 1995), writer and philosopher, was born in Englewood, New Jersey, the son of Thomas Lamont, chairman of the Morgan Bank on Wall Street, and Florence Corliss Lamont. Young Lamont enjoyed a privileged upbringing. After attending local schools, he enrolled in Phillips Exeter Academy in Massachusetts and then Harvard, where he earned a BA in 1924, graduating with high honors and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. After a year of study at Oxford University, he enrolled at Columbia as a doctoral student in philosophy. As a graduate student he taught classes in philosophy at Columbia beginning in 1928. That year he married Margaret H. Irish, a writer. They had four children before they divorced in the early 1960s....
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Lane, Rose Wilder (1886-1968)
In
Rose Wilder Lane urging support of the Ludlow Resolution which is being considered by a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, 10 May 1939. Photograph by Harris ﹠ Ewing. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-DIG-hec-26664)
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Lane, Rose Wilder (1886-1968), a popular magazine writer, novelist, children's author, and noted libertarian thinker
Jennifer Burns
Lane, Rose Wilder (05 December 1886–30 October 1968), a popular magazine writer, novelist, children's author, and noted libertarian thinker, was born near De Smet in the Dakota Territory (later South Dakota), the only surviving child of the homesteaders Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder. During Rose's early childhood the family struggled to make a living as pioneers, traveling in a covered wagon throughout the Midwest before finally settling in Mansfield, Missouri, when Rose was eight. Rose's childhood was marked by poverty and the uncertainty of frontier life. She was ostracized by classmates for her shabby clothes and her worn shoes, and she worried constantly about burdening her parents. Among her most charged and symbolic early memories was a house fire that destroyed the family's home and possessions. Young Rose had started the fire to assist her ailing mother on her sickbed, and she would blame herself for the tragedy well into adulthood. Despite these difficulties Lane would later valorize the pioneer experience as a source of fundamental American values—including hard work, stoicism, and mutual aid—that were threatened by the modern welfare state....
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Lin Yutang (1895-1976)
Maker: Carl Van Vechten
In
Lin Yutang Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1939. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LOT 12735, no. 1218 P&P).
Article
Lin Yutang (1895-1976), novelist, linguist, and philosopher
A. Owen Aldridge
Lin Yutang (10 October 1895–26 March 1976), novelist, linguist, and philosopher, was born Lin Ho-lok in Amoy, Fukien Province, China, the son of Lin Chi-shing, a Presbyterian minister, and Young Shun-min. At age seventeen, he changed his given name, meaning peaceful and happy, to Yutang, meaning elegant language, and came to be known as Lin Yutang. Lin attended English-language schools and graduated from St. John’s University, a private western-oriented institution in Shanghai, in 1916. In the same year he became a teacher at Tsing Hua College in Peking. In January 1919 he married Liu Tsui-fung, a wealthy classmate of his sister; eventually the union produced three children. In the fall of 1919 he embarked with his wife to study comparative literature at Harvard....
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Locke, Alain Leroy (1885-1954)
In
Alain Leroy Locke. Oil on canvas, 1943-1944, by Betsy Graves Reyneau. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Harmon Foundation.
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Locke, Alain Leroy (1885-1954), philosopher and literary critic
Leonard Harris
Locke, Alain Leroy (13 September 1885–09 June 1954), philosopher and literary critic, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Pliny Ishmael Locke, a lawyer, and Mary Hawkins, a teacher and member of the Felix Adler Ethical Society. Locke graduated from Central High School and the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy in Philadelphia in 1904. That same year he published his first editorial, “Moral Training in Elementary Schools,” in ...
Article
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 ...
Article
Paterson, Isabel (1886-1961), noted book critic and libertarian thinker
Jennifer Burns
Paterson, Isabel (22 January 1886–10 January 1961), noted book critic and libertarian thinker, was born on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, Canada, to Francis and Margaret Bowler, recent settlers in the area who ran a grist mill. In the years after her birth her parents moved their family of nine children between Michigan, Utah, and other western territories before returning again to Canada, where they established a ranch. Isabel's childhood was marked by poverty and persistent clashes with her shiftless father. She and her siblings were expected to help support the family, and she received only about two years of formal schooling. Nonetheless Isabel loved to read and sought out books wherever they could be found. She was proud to identify herself as a daughter of the frontier and would later ground her individualism in the values of self-sufficiency and hard work she had learned as a child....
Article
Pitkin, Walter Boughton (1878-1953), philosopher and pundit
Susan Currell
Pitkin, Walter Boughton (06 February 1878–25 January 1953), philosopher and pundit, was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the son of Caleb Seymour Pitkin, a printer, and Lucy Tryphene Boughton Pitkin. In 1880 the family moved to Detroit, where Caleb Pitkin worked as a printer for the Detroit ...
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