Biography
Born into a Jewish-German banker family in New York, as son of Mortimer Loeb Schiff and grandson of Jacob H. Schiff, Schiff graduated from Yale University in 1925 then spent a year at Oxford University in England. He learned the banking business as an employee with Bankers Trust and for a time worked on the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Following the 1931 death of his father, he became a partner in the investment banking firm Kuhn, Loeb & Co.
John Schiff married Edith Baker, granddaughter of George Fisher Baker who was called "the richest, most powerful and most taciturn commercial banker in U. S. history" in a 1934 TIME magazine article. They had two sons, David T. and Peter G. Schiff.
From 1965 to 1976, Schiff served as a Trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation then as Trustee Emeritus until his death in 1987.
Read more about this topic: John Mortimer Schiff
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)
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“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)