Early Life and Education
Nelson Doubleday was born in Brooklyn, New York to Frank Nelson Doubleday (of French Huguenot descent, from a DuBaldy family) and Neltje Blanchan. His older brother Felix Doty was adopted, and he had a younger sister Dorothy. In the city, the children attended a private Friends School run by Quakers. The family moved out to a large estate in Locust Valley on Long Island, called "Effendi" after their father's nickname given to him by his friend, the British author Rudyard Kipling. The author wrote his Just So Stories after the boy Nelson asked him to publish a book of animal stories.
Nelson grew up in the world of book publishing, as his father had founded the Doubleday company. His mother wrote several books about gardening and birds, which were considered notable for their combination of scientific content and lyrical expression.
Nelson later studied at a private school in Ossining, New York. He attended two years of New York University before joining his father in business, which he found more interesting. Even as a youth, he had creative solutions to business issues, for instance, suggesting selling dated magazines at a discount and thereby gaining some revenue from them.
Read more about this topic: Nelson Doubleday
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.”
—Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)