Biography
Joseph Pyne was born in Chester, Pennsylvania. His father, Edward Pyne, was a bricklayer; his mother, Catherine, was a housewife. Pyne graduated from Chester High School in 1942, and immediately enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He saw combat in the South Pacific, where he earned three battle stars. In 1943, during a Japanese bombing attack, he was wounded in the left knee. In 1955, he lost the lower part of that leg due to a rare form of cancer.
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Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“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)
“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)