page_title: William Luther Pierce
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: William Luther Pierce / Life and career / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Personal image, National Coalition, taken over 60 years ago by the military academy.
context_page_description: William Luther Pierce III was an American white supremacist, neo-Nazi, antisemitic author and political commentator. For more than 30 years, he was one of the highest profile individuals of the white nationalist movement. A physicist by profession, he was author of the novels The Turner Diaries and Hunter under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. The former has inspired multiple hate crimes and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Pierce founded the National Alliance, a white nationalist organization, which he led for almost thirty years.
  Born in Atlanta, Georgia, to a Presbyterian family of Scotch-Irish American and English descent, Pierce was a descendant of Thomas H. Watts, the Governor of Alabama and Attorney General of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. As a child, Pierce did well academically, graduating from high school in 1952. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from Rice University in 1955, earned a doctorate from University of Colorado at Boulder in 1962, and became an assistant professor of physics at the Oregon State University in that year.
context_section_description: William Luther Pierce III was born on September 11, 1933, in Atlanta, Georgia. The son of William Luther Pierce Jr. and Marguerite Farrell, his Presbyterian family was of English and Scotch-Irish descent. Pierce's younger brother, Sanders, an engineer, was born in 1936, and later assisted Pierce in his political activities. His father was born in Christiansburg, Virginia in 1892. His mother was born in Richland, Georgia in 1910, with her family being part of the aristocracy of the Old South, descendants of Thomas H. Watts, the Governor of Alabama and Attorney General of the Confederate States of America. After the American Civil War, the family lived a working-class existence. Pierce's father once served as a government representative on ocean-going cargo ships and sent reports back to Washington, D.C.; he later became manager of an insurance agency but was killed in a car accident in 1942. After the elder Pierce's death, the family moved to Montgomery, Alabama and then to Dallas, Texas.
  Pierce performed well in school, skipping one grade. His last two years in high school were spent at the Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas. As a teenager his hobbies and interests were model rockets, chemistry, radios, electronics, and reading science fiction.
  After finishing military school in 1951, Pierce worked briefly in an oil field as a roustabout. He was injured when a four-inch (10 cm) pipe fell on his hand, and he spent the rest of that summer working as a shoe salesman. Pierce earned a scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in physics. He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before attending graduate school, initially at Caltech during 1955–56. At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962. He taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.
caption: Pierce in a high school military academy uniform
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