Life
Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Gardner graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1909, and received his only formal legal education at Valparaiso University School of Law in the state of Indiana. He attended law school for approximately 1 month, was suspended from school when his interest in boxing became a distraction, then settled in California where he became a self-taught attorney and passed the state bar exam in 1911. He opened his own law office in Merced, California, then worked for five years for a sales agency. In 1921, he returned to the practice of law, creating the firm of Sheridan, Orr, Drapeau and Gardner in Ventura, California.
In 1912, he wed Natalie Frances Talbert; they had a daughter, Grace. Gardner practiced at the Ventura firm until 1933, when The Case of the Velvet Claws was published. Much of that novel was set at the historic Pierpont Inn, which was just down the road from his law office.
Gardner gave up the practice of law to devote full-time to writing. In 1937 he moved to Temecula, California, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1968 he married his long-time secretary Agnes Jean Bethell (1902–2002), the "real Della Street".
Read more about this topic: Erle Stanley Gardner
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“No self in the mass: the braver being,
The body that could never be wounded,
The life that never would end, no matter
Who died, the being that was an abstraction.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)