Early Life
Coyote was born in New York City, the son of Ruth (née Fidler) and Morris Cohon, an investment banker. His father was of Sephardic Jewish descent and his mother came from a working-class Ashkenazi Jewish family. Her father, trained as a rabbi in Russia, escaped being drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, and eventually ran a small candy-store in the Bronx. Coyote "was raised in a highly intellectual, cultural but unreligious family" involved in left-wing politics. He grew up in Englewood, New Jersey and graduated from the Dwight-Englewood School there in 1960. Coyote later said that he was "half black and half white inside" due to the strong influence of Susie Nelson, his family's African-American housekeeper.
While a student at Grinnell College (Iowa) in 1961, Coyote was one of the organizers of a group of twelve students who traveled to Washington, D.C. during the Cuban Missile Crisis supporting U.S. President John F. Kennedy's "peace race". Kennedy invited the group into the White House (the first time protesters had ever been so recognized) and they met for several hours with McGeorge Bundy. The group received wide press coverage. They mimeographed the resulting headlines and sent them to every college in the United States.
Once graduated from Grinnell College with a BA in English Literature in 1964, Coyote moved to the West Coast, despite having been accepted at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and commenced working towards a Master's Degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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