Robert Anton Wilson - Early Life

Early Life

"Is", "is." "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

— Robert Anton Wilson, The Historical Illuminatus, as spoken by Sigismundo Celine.

Wilson, born Robert Edward Wilson in Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York, spent his first years in Flatbush, and moved with his family to Gerritsen Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed until he turned 13. He suffered from polio as a child, and found generally effective treatment with the Kenny Method (created by Elizabeth Kenny) which the American Medical Association repudiated at that time. Polio's effects remained with Wilson throughout his life, usually manifesting as minor muscle spasms causing him to use a cane occasionally until 2000, when he experienced a major bout with post-polio syndrome that would continue until his death.

Wilson attended Catholic grammar school, most likely the school associated with Gerritsen Beach's Resurrection Church. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School to remove himself from the Catholic influence. While working as an ambulance driver Wilson attended New York University, studying engineering and mathematics. He lectured at the Free University of New York on 'Anarchist and Synergetic Politics' when it was founded in 1965.

He worked as an engineering aide, a salesman, a copywriter, and as associate editor of Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1971. Wilson adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Anton, for his writings, at first telling himself that he would save the "Edward" for when he wrote the Great American Novel and later finding that "Robert Anton Wilson" had become an established identity.

In 1979 he received a Ph.D. in psychology from Paideia University in California, an unaccredited institution that has since closed. Wilson reworked his dissertation, and it found publication in 1983 as Prometheus Rising.

Wilson married freelance writer and poet Arlen Riley in 1958; they had four children. Their youngest daughter Luna—beaten to death in an apparent robbery in the store where she worked in 1976 at the age of 15—became the first person to have her brain preserved by the Bay Area Cryonics Society. Arlen Riley Wilson died in 1999 following a series of strokes.