Background and Education
Hinton was born in Chicago. His father, Sebastian Hinton, was a lawyer who committed suicide; his mother, Carmelita Hinton, was an educator and the founder of The Putney School, an independent progressive school in Vermont. He was a nephew of novelist E. L. Voynich (1864–1960), whose 1897 book The Gadfly sold over a million copies and became the number one American bestseller in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Before graduating from Cornell University, Hinton attended Harvard, where he was captain of the ski team. In 1939 he raced the famous Inferno race from the summit of Mt Washington, skiing behind Toni Matt, who famously schussed the headwall. Hinton commented in 1996 that "he knew Matt did something special, as a huge roar came up from the crowd."
Read more about this topic: William H. Hinton
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