Biography
He was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He graduated from Indiana University (BA, 1935; MA, 1942) and earned a Ph.D. in psychology in 1954 from Columbia University. While working as a psychologist in an Indiana state hospital, he met Kinsey and came to work on his seminal sex-research project. Pomeroy personally recorded approximately 6,000 sexual histories. He was co-author with Kinsey on the landmark books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). He went into the private practice of sex therapy in New York City in 1963 and wrote books about adolescent sexuality for popular consumption. In 1976, he became dean of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and an adjunct professor at California Medical School and California State University at Northridge. Pomeroy retired due to declining health in 1983 and died in Bloomington, Indiana of Lewy body dementia. He was portrayed in the 2004 theatrical film Kinsey by Chris O'Donnell.
He is mentioned in Whit Stillman's 1990 movie Metropolitan, when Nick Smith reads from the jacket copy of his book Girls and Sex.
Read more about this topic: Wardell Pomeroy
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)