Biography

Family and early years

The family into which Carl Rogers was born, according to Rogers' own description, could have posed for Grant Woods' "American Gothic," the somber portrait of two Puritanical-looking members of a nineteenth-century American Midwest farm family. But beyond his family's Bible-reading and work ethic, there seems to have been very little that was unique about the middle-class, middle-American beginnings of Carl Ransom Rogers. Oak Park, Illinois, also the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, was a quiet suburb of Chicago when Carl Rogers was born on January 8, 1902. He was the fourth child of prosperous middle-class parents, preceded by two older brothers, Lester and Ross, and a sister, Margaret. His mother, Julia (Cushing) Rogers was descended from New England ancestors that had arrived in America on the...