Lucian Pye - Early Life

Early Life

Lucian W. Pye was born on October 21, 1921 in Fenzhou, in the Shanxi Province in northwest China, to Congregational missionaries. He moved to Oberlin, Ohio for his primary education. Pye was raised bilingual and lost much of his grasp of the Chinese language upon moving to Ohio, only to relearn it later. Pye graduated in 1943 from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Pye met Mary Toombs Waddill, of Greenville, South Carolina at Carlisle; they married in 1945, and she would co-write and help edit many of his books and writings over the years.

Pye returned to China at the end of World War II to became an intelligence officer with the 5th U.S. Marines Corps, achieving the rank of second lieutenant. He returned to the United States to attend graduate school through the G.I. Bill at Yale University, where he was introduced to comparative politics by his mentor, political scientist Gabriel Almond. Almond later said Pye "generally (left) me a little breathless; he had so much energy and enthusiasm." During his time at Yale, Pye worked with other significant political scientists like Almond, Harold Lasswell and Nathan Leites in exploring the psychological, sociological and anthropological elements of international affairs, rather than the standard and accepted "realism" approach. Pye wrote his dissertation on the attitudes underlying the warlord system of politics in China during the 1920s and earned his Ph.D. in 1951.