Early Life
Kirkland was born in Hillsborough, Orange County, North Carolina. He was appointed to the United States Military Academy in 1852, but did not graduate. Despite this failure, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps in 1855. He resigned his U.S. commission in 1860.
Read more about this topic: William Whedbee Kirkland
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you—it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)