John Howard Griffin - Early Life

Early Life

Griffin was born in Dallas, Texas to John Walter Griffin and Lena May Young Griffin. His mother was a classical pianist, and Griffin acquired his love of music from her. Awarded a musical scholarship, he studied French and literature at the University of Poitiers and medicine at the École de Médecine. At 19, he worked as a medic in the French Resistance at the Atlantic seaport of Saint-Nazaire, where he helped smuggle Austrian Jews to safety and freedom.

Griffin then served 39 months in the United States Army Air Corps, stationed in the South Pacific. He spent 1943-44 as the only Caucasian on Nuni, one of the Solomon Islands, where he was assigned to study the local culture; he even married an islander. His 1956 novel Nuni is a semi-autobiographical work that draws heavily on his year "marooned" on the island, and shows an interest in ethnography he followed more fully in Black Like Me. He was decorated for bravery.

Left blind by a 1946 accident in the United States Army Air Corps, he began to write. He came home to Texas, converted to Catholicism in 1952, becoming a lay Carmelite, and taught piano. In 1953, he married (with dispensation from the Vatican on account of his first marriage) one of his students, Elizabeth Ann Holland, with whom he had four children. He was a lifelong Democrat. In 1957 he regained his eyesight and became an accomplished photographic artist. Griffin's experiences in blindness were posthumously published as Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision.