Early Life
James Kahn was born in Chicago in 1947, and raised in one of its suburbs, Des Plaines. His father, Alfred Kahn, was a physician, and his mother, Judith Pesmen Kahn, a painter/sculptor/inventor. James began playing the guitar at age 12, influenced extensively by the folk music of the early ‘60’s. He graduated from Maine Township High School West (arch rival of Maine East, from which Harrison Ford had graduated two years earlier) in 1965; then attended the University of Chicago, where he majored in Biology, drew a draft lottery number of 3, became involved in the anti-Viet Nam War movement, participated in the 1968 Democratic Convention riots, and studied with the Byronic scholar Jerome McGann. When, during his fifth year in the college, his short story, “The Box”, won second place in a U. of C. contest, one of the judges, well-regarded poet Daryl Hine, sent Kahn’s story to Playboy magazine, which bought it and published it in March 1971 – marking Kahn’s debut as a professional writer. (That same issue of Playboy featured essays by sociologist Richard Flacks and psychotherapist Bruno Bettelheim, two other University of Chicago thinkers, making that issue a good one to buy for the articles.)
Read more about this topic: James Kahn
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You must, to get through life well, practice industry with economy, never create a debt for anything that is not absolutely necessary, and if you make a promise to pay money at a day certain, be sure to comply with it. If you do not, you lay yourself liable to have your feelings injured and your reputation destroyed with the just imputation of violating your word.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)