Philip W. Anderson The Nobel Prize in Physics 1979

autobiography

My father, Harry Warren Anderson, was a professor of plant pathology at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where I was brought up from 1923 to 1940. Although raised on the farm - my grandfather was an unsuccessful fundamentalist preacher turned farmer - my father and his brother both became professors. My mother's father was a professor of mathematics at my father's college, Wabash, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and her brother was a Rhodes Scholar, later a professor of English, also at Wabash College; on both sides my family were secure but impecunious Midwestern academics. At Illinois my parents belonged to a group of warm, settled friends, whose life centered on the outdoors and in particular on the "Saturday Hikers", and my happiest hours as a child and adolescent were spent hiking, canoeing, vacationing, picnicking, and singing around the campfire with this group. They were unusually politically conscious for that place and time, and we lived with a strong sense of frustratio