Early Life and Family
Du Pont was born in Paris, France, son of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont and Sophie Dalmas du Pont. He came to America in 1800 as an infant and grew up around the gunpowder mills founded by his father on the Brandywine Creek in Delaware. Later he attended Mount Airy College, in Germantown, Pennsylvania and then studied chemistry at Dickinson College. While there he was President of Belles Lettres Literary Society and became a friend of one of his professors, Thomas Cooper. He later became Cooper's assistant at the University of Pennsylvania. Alfred du Pont married Margaretta Elizabeth Lamott in 1824 and they had seven children.
Read more about this topic: Alfred V. Du Pont
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D’Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)