Repository | Book | Chapter

Consider, for example, Lester Frank Ward. The American Aristotle, his biographer has called him,² and the title is not entirely undeserved, for Ward too was a master of those who know. The tenth and last child of Justus Ward, an itinerant mechanic, and Silence Rolph Ward, a clergyman's daughter, he was born at Joliet, Illinois, June 18th, 1841. His childhood was one of hardship. The family was dirt poor, and young Frank, as he was then called, did his share and more of helping make ends meet. When he was sixteen his father died, and he set out for Pennsylvania, there to become an unskilled laborer and sometime farm hand. Evenings he studied by candlelight the few precious textbooks he had managed to buy out of his meagre earnings. He was twenty before he scraped together sufficient funds to allow him to attend his first real school. The Susquehanna Collegiate Institute of Towanda, Pennsylvania, for all its grand name, wasn't much. In fact, young Ward found to his surprise that his private studies had put him considerably ahead of his classmates in almost every subject. He stayed but a term, and left to take a job teaching school. By now the Civil War had begun, and in August of 1862 he got married and a week later enlisted as a private.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-3645-0_5

Full citation: