Background
The son of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and literary critic/teacher Mark Van Doren and novelist and writer Dorothy Van Doren, and nephew of critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Carl Van Doren, Charles Van Doren was a committed academic with an unusually broad range of interests. He graduated from The High School of Music & Art and then earned a B.A. degree in Liberal Arts (1946) from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, as well as a master's degree in astrophysics (1949) and a doctorate in English (1955), both at Columbia University. He was also a student at Cambridge University in England.
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