Jack Schaefer was born in Cleveland, Ohio on November 19, 1907. As part of a family of avid readers—his father was a friend of Carl Sandburg and his sister and he both editors of a high school literary magazine—Schaefer’s formative years were spent with books. As a child, Schaefer read Burroughs’s Tarzan stories and the literature of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope. To these books and writers he soon added an interest in Greek and Roman classics, which he studied as an undergraduate at Oberlin (Nuwer 49, 52). While Schaefer’s enthusiasm for reading remained through his adulthood, he abandoned graduate studies at Columbia in 1930 after the thesis committee refused his proposal to research “the development of motion pictures”, and by 1973 he was describing literary…
2300 words
Citation: Wanat, Matt. "Jack Warner Schaefer". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 May 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12915, accessed 23 November 2024.]
