Biography
Clinton Lawrence Rossiter III was the son of Winton Goodrich Rossiter, a stockbroker, and Dorothy Shaw. Winton Goodrich Rossiter died on February 14, 1954 at age 64.
Clinton grew up in Bronxville, New York as the third of four siblings: Dorothy Ann Rossiter, William Winton Goodrich Rossiter (William also attended Westminster and Cornell University), Clinton, and Joan Rossiter. He was raised to give priority to family and social expectations. He attended Westminster preparatory school in Simsbury, CT and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in 1939, where he was also a member of the Quill and Dagger society. In 1942 Princeton University awarded him a doctorate for his thesis Constitutional Dictatorship : Crisis government in the modern democracies.
Immediately after American entry into World War II, Rossiter joined the U.S. Naval Reserves and served for three years as a gunnery officer, mostly on the USS Alabama (BB-60) in the Pacific theater, reaching the rank of lieutenant.
He married Mary Ellen Crane in September 1947. They had three sons (all Cornell graduates): David Goodrich Rossiter (1949), Caleb Stewart Rossiter (1951) (Caleb also attended Westminster), and Winton Goodrich Rossiter (1954).
Read more about this topic: Clinton Rossiter
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“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)