Life
Merle Eugene Curti was born in Papillion, suburb of Omaha, on September 15, 1897. His parents were John Eugene, immigrant from Switzerland, and Alice Hunt, a Yankee from Vermont. Curti went to high school in Omaha then went on to obtain a bachelor's degree in 1920 from Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude. He then spent a year studying in France where he met Margaret Wooster, 1898-1963, a PhD from the University of Chicago who was a pioneer in research on child psychology. They married in 1925 and had two daughters. Curti also received his Ph. D. in 1927 from Harvard as one of the last students of Frederick Jackson Turner.
Curti taught at Beloit College, Smith College, and Columbia University. Then in 1942, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he taught for twenty-six years. He also taught in Japan, Australia, and India and lectured throughout Europe.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The record of one’s life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.
“I have no name:
“I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
“Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee!”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.”
—Betty Friedan (20th century)
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)