Ralph Barton Perry

Born in Poultney, Vermont, on July 3, 1876, he studied at Princeton and then Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. after working with William James. After brief teaching posts at Williams and Smith, he joined Harvard in 1902 and spent most of his career there, eventually becoming Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy.

He is best known as an important voice in American New Realism, a movement that pushed back against idealism and argued that the world exists independently of the mind. His books and essays also reached beyond academic debate into ethics, religion, politics, and education, which gave his work a broad public life as well as a scholarly one.

Many readers know him through The Thought and Character of William James, the two-volume biography that won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1936. He died in 1957, leaving behind a body of work that connects rigorous philosophy with everyday moral and civic concerns.