List provided by the Washington Post
James Agee attended St. Andrews Sewanee, an Episcopal boarding school on a scenic mountaintop in Tennessee. His mother, a widow, married a bursar at the school. After the family moved to Maine, Agee attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
Edward Albee was born in Washington D.C. and adopted at the age of 2 weeks by a millionaire couple near New York City. At age 12, he entered Lawrenceville School, a boarding school near Princeton, New Jersey. Three years later, he was dismissed for cutting classes. Hoping to install some discipline, Albee’s father enrolled him in Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he was dismissed within a year. Somehow, the struggling student managed to be admitted to Choate, a boys’ boarding school in Connecticut that merged with a nearby girls’ school in 1974 and became today’s Choate Rosemary Hall. Albee graduated from Choate in 1946.
Elizabeth Bishop was raised by her grandparents and other relatives. She spent her high school years at Walnut Hill, a boarding school in Natick, Mass. Her career as a poet began with writings published in her school’s literary magazine.
Pearl Buck grew up in China, where her parents were missionaries. At age 15, she went to boarding school in Shanghai-her first formal education.
Truman Capote attended several private schools, including Trinity School and St. Johns Academy in New York. Although he taught himself to read and write at age 5, he disliked school and did poorly. He later credited his English teacher at Greenwich High School in Connecticut with being the first person to recognize his writing talent and provide guidance. He wrote poems and stories for the school paper, The Green Witch, but he never graduated from high school and never went to college.
John Dos Passos spent a year at Sidwell Friends School before going to boarding school at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. T.S. Eliot attended Milton Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts.
F. Scott Fitzgerald attended the Newman School, a Catholic boarding school in New Jersey, from 1911 to 1913. Fitzgerald’s great great grandfather built the house that is now the central building of Maret School in Washington, D.C.
John Hersey was born in China, where his parents were missionaries. He attended Hotchkiss School, a boarding school in Connecticut. John Irving, author of The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany, is a graduate of Exeter. He also grew up on the campus, since his stepfather taught history there. Irving reportedly “became a bookworm despite having dyslexia.”
John Knowles grew up in West Virginia. His brother attended Mercersburg Academy in nearby Pennsylvania, but John found a brochure from Exeter lying around the house and decided to apply. An impressive essay helped get him admitted, but Knowles was so poorly prepared that he was asked to repeat a grade. At Exeter, he learned how to study and fell in love with the school.
One of his characters in A Separate Peace is modeled after his classmate Gore Vidal. Like the boys in the novel, “We really did have a club whose members jumped from the branch of a very high tree into the river as initiation,” says Knowles.
Mary McCarthy, author of The Group, was orphaned at the age of 6. She attended the Annie Wright Seminary (now Annie Wright School), in Tacoma, Washington-the oldest boarding school in the Pacific Northwest.
John McPhee spent a year at Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, after graduating from high school. His book The Headmaster is about the man who ran the school for 66 years.
J.D. Salinger was raised Jewish and spent ninth and tenth grade at The McBurney School, a New York City private school affiliated with the YMCA movement. Like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, Salinger was captain of the school fencing team. He spent his last two years of high school at Valley Forge Military Academy and graduated in 1936.
Susan Shreve graduated from Sidwell Friends School in 1957.
Harriet Beecher Stowe spent her teen years at a boarding school in Hartford, Connecticut run by her older sister. Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary was considered one of a few schools “where a young woman could get an education equivalent to a young man’s” in the 1820’s.
Gore Vidal spent his early school years at Potomac School in McLean, Va., then at Landon School in Bethesda, Md. Concerned about his poor classroom performance, his mother moved him to Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. for grades 3 to 5. Despite his leadership on the playground, his mother continued to be worry about his poor academic performance and moved him again, this time down the street to St. Albans School. Vidal spent the next three years there and became one of the school’s youngest boarding students. He loved to read but apparently didn’t do his homework. His grades were poor even in English, where he disliked the focus on memorization and rote learning. Vidal’s mother then sent him to Los Alamos Ranch School, despite the objects of her ex-husband, who was forced to pay the extremely high tuition. Vidal intentionally managed to get himself dismissed within a year. In 1943, Vidal graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Los Alamos Ranch School closed when the U.S. government took over to develop the atom bomb.
Thomas Wolfe attended North State Fitting School, a private school in Asheville, North Carolina. Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, who ran the school, were models for Mr. and Mrs. Leonard in Look Homeward Angel.
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