In his own words

About Daniel Goleman

• Biography
• In his own words

In his own words

I was born in Stockton, California, on March 7, 1946, the leading tip of the tidal wave of post-war baby boomers (I must have been conceived just around the time of V-E day, the end of World War II in Europe, June 6, 1945). My parents were college professors, my father taught in the humanities—including Latin and a course on world literature—at what became San Joaquin Delta Community College (the library there is named after him); my mother was a social worker who taught in the sociology department of what is now the University of the Pacific.

Perhaps because I was president of my high school, I received a scholarship for leadership from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to attend Amherst College, a place I had never seen in faraway New England. In part due to culture shock (and taking advantage of the then-new Amherst Independent Scholar program), I transferred to the University of California at Berkeley for my junior year and part of my senior year, returning to Amherst to graduate. At Berkeley, where I was an anthropology major, I was lucky enough to have several remarkable professors, including a graduate seminar with the brilliant sociologist Erving Goffman on rituals of social interaction. When I returned to Amherst, I wrote my honors paper on mental health in historical, anthropological and social perspectives, graduating magna cum laude—a miracle given my disastrous academic performance there my freshman year.

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