Biography
Bissell was born and died in Dubuque, Iowa. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and graduated from Harvard University.
He wrote a memoir of his experiences at Harvard, You Can Always Tell a Harvard Man (McGraw Hill, 1965). He worked on a freighter on the American Export Business Lines and riverboats, served as vice president at a Dubuque clothing manufacturer which had been bought by his great-grandfather (who worked his way from the bottom to the top of the company in a true Horatio Alger kind of story). He also lived for several years and raised his children in Rowayton, Connecticut.
Bissell wrote works about his experiences on the river that had some critics comparing him to Mark Twain, and 7½ Cents was based on his experiences in the garment industry. Bissell wrote 71⁄2 Cents while he was the vice-president of his family's pajama factory located in Dubuque, Iowa.
Upon his death, some of Bissell's personal library ended up for sale in the used bookstore of the Tri-State Independent Blind Society.
Read more about this topic: Richard Pike Bissell
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“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)