maintained an intense intellectual life. She enjoyed conversing about biology and the history of science with scientists, academics, and physicians, who visited our home. In talks with her friends, my mother demonstrated the pleasures of the life of the mind, which has made a lasting impression on me. In fact, when I speak of the type of intellectual life she created in our home, several colleagues refer to it as a 'salon.' I think they are right. Through her I acquired an intellectual treasure early in my life.

There was a splendor about my father in his achieving prominence in surgery and setting an example of excellence. Growing up, after my parents divorced when I was four years old, I had a difficult time with my father whose house I would go to once a week. I did enjoy the marvelous dinners, although not the conversation there which paled in comparison to that my mother created in the milieu of our home. I was in awe of my father and afraid to be alone with him. I repeatedly turned down opportunities to travel alone with him in Europe, which I now regret, though I did go for a week's walking tour with him when I was 18 years old. Although I was separated and estranged from him, after his death I felt I had incorporated some of his better attributes.

The first loss I suffered in life followed from my parents' divorcing. This domestic struggle influenced my early interest in civil war, introducing the American (1861-1865) and Spanish (1936-1939) conflicts. The deaths of my parents were important to me. My mother died in 1967 when I was 43. I had a feeling of loss after her death as well as a loss of stimulus in work. Then I introjected her values and felt as if she was always an audience for me: as I wrote, I thought of how she would respond to my ideas. After my father's death when I was 50, I felt liberated from some of his criticisms of me and freer to identify with some of his best values. I felt freer to work on Darwin and added a great deal to what I wrote about Darwin based on my father's outlook. I do feel the loss of my parents freed me to work more and from being preoccupied with their lives and caring for them.

I was an only child, although when my mother remarried when I was five, I then had a three- year-older stepsister whose own mother had died in childbirth. We did not share activities and she did not exert an influence on me. Later, I became an early critic of her pro-Communist position and tried without success to get her to read Trotsky's critique of Stalin. In retrospect, my mother strongly favored me, and my stepfather Mitchell (Itelson) favored his daughter, which was part of the reason for the mild estrangement between my stepsister and me. My mother's second husband was in commercial real estate and lacked the social prestige and money of my father, as well as my mother's cultural interests. All of our many social friends were acquired and cultivated by my mother. Mitchell was kind and sweet but detached from me, my friends, and my interests. He and I never did any activities together and he was not an influence in my life. He outlived my mother by seven years.

How did you feel about being a Jew?

## PHE:

RC: am a non-observant Jew who has never been in a synagogue nor had any training or RC: am a non-observant Jew who has never been in a synagogue nor had any training or interest in the Jewish religion. I attended, as did my children, and my parents as children, Ethical