Alex Shoumatoff - Childhood and Education

Childhood and Education

Shoumatoff was born in Mount Kisco, New York. He grew up in the 1950s in Bedford, New York, an exurban enclave of old-line WASPs that is now most famously inhabited by famous people and top American business leaders. He went to the local country-day school, Rippowam, where he later, in his mid-twenties, taught middle-school science. Upon his graduation from the eighth grade, the family moved to London and began to summer in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland. His father, a passionate mountain climber, took Shoumatoff and his older brother Nick up major peaks in the Alps. When he was four, his parents put him in a summer camp in Gstaad, Switzerland, where he learned to speak French.

Shoumatoff did his secondary schooling at St. Paul's School, a then all-boys boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, where he was at the top of his class and the captain of the squash team. When he was 16, having been blown away by a record of the South Carolina blues man Pink Anderson, he bought a guitar and wandered down to the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, New York, where Izzy Young, who ran the operation, sent him to Harlem to take lessons from the Reverend Gary Davis, a forgotten blind black southern country blues guitar player, who was living in a shack behind a row of condemned buildings and playing in the street. Davis would have a huge impact on Shoumatoff and would become the subject of Shoumatoff's first published magazine piece.

He was admitted to Harvard University. He studied poetry writing with Robert Lowell in a class that included fellow literary journalist Tracy Kidder and was on the Harvard Lampoon. His senior year roommates included Douglas Kenney, who went on to write the scripts of Animal House and Caddyshack and to found the National Lampoon.