Nathan Witt - Early Life

Early Life

Nathan Wittowsky was born February 11, 1903, into a Jewish family on the Lower East Side of New York City. His father changed the family name to Witt shortly after his birth. His college education was interrupted several times by the need to earn a living, but he graduated in 1927 from New York University.

Angered by what he perceived was the judicial mistreatment and illegal execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, he drove a taxi cab for two years to earn money for law school. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1932, specializing in labor law. He attended Harvard shortly after Alger Hiss had left the school, and he was a friend of Donald, a Harvard Law classmate and Alger Hiss' younger brother.

Read more about this topic:  Nathan Witt

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:

    “We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
    —Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)

    “What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps most of all, ideally, what is wanted is a comfortable background, a breathing space of intermission between the intensities of private life and the calculations of public life.”
    —Joseph Epstein (b. 1937)