Early Life
Although born in the US, Lattimore was raised in Tianjin, China, where his parents, David and Margaret Lattimore, were teachers of English at a Chinese university. (His brother was the classics translator Richmond Lattimore. One of his sisters was the children's author Eleanor Frances Lattimore.) After being schooled at home by his mother, he left China at the age of twelve and attended schools in Switzerland and St Bees School, England (1915–1919), but returned in 1919 when it turned out that he would not have enough funds for attending university.
He worked first for a newspaper and then for a British import/export related business. This gave him the opportunity to travel extensively in China and time to study Chinese with an old-fashioned Confucian scholar. His commercial travels also gave him a feel for the realities of life and the economy. A turning point was negotiating the passage of a trainload of wool through the lines of two battling warlords early in 1925, an experience which led him the next year to follow the caravans across Inner Mongolia to the end of the line in Xinjiang.
The managers of his firm, however, saw no advantage in subsidizing his travels but sent send him to spend a year in Beijing as government liaison. During the year he spent there before departing on his expedition, he met his wife, Eleanor Holgate. For their honeymoon they planned to travel from Beijing to India, he overland, she by rail across Siberia, a mammoth feat in the first half of the 20th century, but in the event the plans were disrupted and she had to travel alone by horse-drawn sled for four hundred miles in February to find him. She described her journey in Turkestan Reunion (1934), he in The Desert Road to Turkestan (1928) and High Tartary (1930). This trip laid the ground for his lifelong interest in all matters related to the Mongols and other peoples of the Silk Road.
Upon his return to America in 1928, he succeeded in receiving a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council for further travel in Manchuria, then for the academic year 1928/1929 as a student at Harvard University. He returned to China 1930-1933 with fellowships from the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
In 1934, he became editor of Pacific Affairs, published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, which he edited from Beijing. Rather than have bland official statements, he made it his policy to make the journal a "forum of controversy." As he later recalled, he was "continually in hot water, especially with the Japan Council, which thought I was too anti-imperialist, and the Soviet Council, which thought that its own anti-imperialist line was the only permissible one...." As explained below, others later accused him of motives which were less scholarly than political. Lattimore sought articles from a wide range of perspectives and made the journal a forum for new ideas, especially from the social sciences and social philosophy. Scholars and writers of all persuasions were contributors, including Pearl S. Buck, some Chinese literary figures, and dedicated Marxists.
After sojourns in New York and London and a trip to the Soviet Union, the Lattimores returned to Beijing in 1937. Owen visited the Communist headquarters at Yan'an to act as translator for T. A. Bisson and Philip Jaffé, who were gathering material for Amerasia as an activist journal of political commentary. There he met Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. He was impressed with their candor, but had a less favorable experience on his visit to the party school for national minorities. When he spoke to the Mongols in Mongolian, his Chinese hosts broke off the session.
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