Early Life and Education
Sperling was born into a poor sharecropper family in the Missouri Ozarks. His father worked for the railroad and his mother was a fundamentalist Christian. He spent several years as a sailor in the merchant marine, and even as a wandering 1950s beatnik. He received his undergraduate education at Reed College, Oregon, a master's from the University of California, Berkeley under the G.I. Bill, and then went on to attain a PhD in Economic History at the University of Cambridge.
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