Biography
Hooper was born out of wedlock to Sarah Wade in Newport in Cocke County in eastern Tennessee. His father, Lemuel Washington Hooper, I, was a physician. Ben and his mother moved to what is now Jefferson City, then New Market, and finally Knoxville, Tennessee. There, his mother placed him in the St. John's Orphanage, operated by the Episcopal Church. When he was nine, young Ben was legally adopted by his father, who named him Hooper and reared him in Newport as a Baptist.
Hooper graduated in 1890 from Baptist-affiliated Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City. He then studied the law under Judge Horace Nelson Cate, and four years later was admitted to the bar.
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Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“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)