The Day I Became an Autodidact

Book excerpt: MY HIGH SCHOOL classmates completed four years of college last June, a date at which I too had completed four years of study. Their graduation was greeted by presents, parties and diplomas. Mine never occurred. What studies and studies and never graduates? The answer can be found in one word: autodidact. It can be used to describe anyone who is self-taught, and the self-taught are almost anyone. There have been autodidacts of every type: the father of our country (George Washington) and quite a few barons of industry (Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller); autodidacts interested in getting there (Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart) and those who created the music to carry us along (John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland); novelists (Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens); playwrights (Noel Coward, Clare Boothe Luce, William Saroyan, Tom Stoppard); film makers (D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Irving Thalberg), and autodidacts interested in all that and marriage, too (Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon).