Abstract
This is a study of families and how they may facilitate the achievement of eminence of one (rarely more) of their members. The study was originally planned to center upon three American males born in the late 1800s, within a decade of one another, and eminent within three different non-science fields. In the process of researching these men, the author became impressed with the appearance of a number of the same developmental processes and basic family parameters in their own and other eminent persons' families. While these may be true for the three original subjects, these similarities led to three questions which this paper addresses. Because the original subjects were born in the late 1800s, this raised the question of how far back in time can these same parameters be found operating. To answer this question, the life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) is examined. The second question asks what is (are) an important interpersonal relationships in families that assists in the capacity for the sustained lifelong creativity upon which eminence is based. The significance of this intrafamily parameter is examined in the life of Thomas Chatterton, Jr. (1752-1770) who was exceptionally creative, but committed suicide at age 17. The third question involves some of the same family variables as the other two, but centers more directly on the family's cultural context. The main question this becomes is: Do any or all of the same parameters function in the families of eminent American minorities? And here I examine Duke Ellington's (1899-1974) family. These three cases obviously involve methodological as well as conceptual issues.

The basic position taken is that although there is no single characteristic, experience, relationship, or value essential to the achievement of eminence, the presence and interaction among a family's "genetic" possibilities, its inter-generational and transgenerational transfer processes, the particular birth-order of the indexed child and the family's ability to support this child's extended immersion in exploring his/her skills and interests enhances their possibility of achieving eminence.

Introduction
The major theme of this paper has already been stated by T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets (1954), a poem written late in his life: "Home is where one starts from." I believe that creativity is more about beginnings than endings and therefore it is appropriate about persons who start on difficult journeys to be themselves and do their own work, but never completely leave home to explore these themes. But this cannot be adequately done without taking into consideration a second theme, one expressed by Germaine Greer: "Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves" (Augarde, 1991). I know this is true of all of us, but I believe it is unquestionably true and necessary for the creative person. Otherwise, without this effort they would look and act like the rest of us, which they certainly do not when at work. However this is not without its limits (and risks). Like all humans, the potentially creative must make a start and work with the materials, the resources, and the opportunities that are in and before them. Although no one is born a hundred percent "new" and distinctive, we all have an unquantifiable potential to become more and more ourselves if we take the chances to do so and work at it. And this is where families generally come in. They are especially early on those materials, resources, and, for some of us, the first and most lasting opportunity. This is no idle pursuit because if we are to fully understand how creativity comes to be and why it is as rare as it is, then it is important for us to know where creative persons come from and why from only some families and cultural contexts.

At the beginning of this study I was concerned with a question similar to the one that dogged Calhoun (1973) when he began his exploration into the effects upon children's development from the rapid modernization of American education during 1750 to 1870. No sooner had he begun than he stopped: "What if all this reorganization and investment made no differences to the quality of the human being for whom the effort was being spent? Did educational moderations actually improve the ability of people to think about their world and to perform in it--did this make any difference...?" (Calhoun, 1973, p. viii). The question Calhoun and I (Albert & Runco, 1986) have shared over the years is much the same: When and how do (institutions) families make a difference in careers and achievement, if they do?

The upshot of my own efforts has been to convince me that there is an identifiable pattern of parameters reappearing among the family histories of many gifted youth and eminent persons. At first I believed this held truest for the non-sciences. But now I think there is some overlap among non-scientists and physical scientists. For example, with some personality dispositions and work habits, both groups share an uncommonly high rate of special birth-orders, early parental losses, and talent-rich families. On the other hand, there are some regularly appearing differences primarily in terms of personality dispositions (parents' and own) and their intra-family relationships.

Why These Three Men?
Before making the switch to Chaucer, Chatterton and Ellington I had been reading for this specific project about the lives of United States presidents (e.g., Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman); several generals (especially Douglas MacArthur; British Prime Ministers born in different eras such as Disraeli, Churchill and Harold Wilson; non-physical scientists (e.g., Darwin, Freud); physical scientists (e.g., Einstein, Newton); composers (e.g., Mozart, Beethoven); and equally important, women such as Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minster, and the three Bronte sisters.

Becoming increasingly concerned that many of the biographies had taken on a "sameness" to them, I was led to believe that a test of the generality of these basic similarities was called for rather than piling more biographical material into the data collection. The question came down to: Were these similarities "out there" independent of me or had I unknowingly settled into a pattern of interpretation that pulled out similarities and glossed over differences?

To test between these possibilities requires answers to three simple questions about the data. First, how far back in time can we find the basic no-science pattern? To answer this question, I bring Chaucer into the picture, who was born and died in the fourteenth century. Somewhat to my surprise I found that there is enough information available about a person active so far back in time (593 years ago).

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400): How Far Back?
Chaucer's history is a test to see if--and which--the significant experiences and important facts of family history, birth-status, education and career choice that often appear in the lives of many eminent men in and near this century hold true for eminence achieved much earlier. Among the interesting facts about Chaucer is that although his birth year for many years was not agreed upon, the exact date and time of his death has always been known. Such is the historical certainty that comes with fame. The first collection of his works by Speght (1598) gave it as 1328, but as Chaucer's career flourished, the facts became better recorded; now scholars (Pearsall, 1992) are certain that 1340 fits best the established chronology of Chaucer's life, although Robinson (1957) complains of this uncertainty. As recently as 1992, Richmond debates the 1340 date.

No one can deny Chaucer's importance to the English language and literature; it is monumental. When he first wrote there were three commonly used languages--English, French, Latin. Like most educated persons, Chaucer was bilingual using French and English as a civil servant who was busy in court and everyday life. Although French was the language of poetry and sophistication, Chaucer by his middle thirties, when he wrote what later became the Second Nun's Tale, had moved from French into English. He was the earliest author to write in an indigenous English, moving from Middle English--the mixture of Norman-based Anglicized French used in English courts and Latinate English written in legal and Royal documents and contracts. According to Abrams (1986) and Richmond (1992) only after Chaucer is there modem standard English language which is "ascendant" and a literature that stood separate from the earlier religious and mythic works of Anglo-Saxon writers such as Bede (673-735) and Beowulf (early 700's), and even Chaucer's great contemporary, William Langland (b.c. 1330 - b.c. 1400), who wrote Piers Plowman in Middle English. I choose Chaucer only because he is the earliest eminent English author for whom there is anything approaching a valid historical record (Abrams, 1986; Robinson, 1957). At the start not knowing anything of his personal life--nor is there yet much known (Richmond, 1992)--I expected to find other factors significant in his career, although I was not clear what they might be five hundred years earlier. Yet what I found looking into Chaucer's biography (Bloom, 1985; The Dictionary of National Biography, 1973; Dunn, 1952; Manly, 1928; Pearsall, 1992; Robinson, 1957; Skeat, 1929) was that there was little biographical information collected together (Manly, 1928; Pearsall, 1992) and it was long after his death--1400--that scholars were confident in distinguishing his works from those attached to him as part of his legend (Robinson, 1957). In puffing together those facts that writers agree on, I find some of the same family historical and social facts found in the biographies of contemporary eminent men. There are enough to convince me that these similarities argue for lawfulness in the relationships among human talent and the environments that favor them. It appears possible that, given comparable family histories, values, and resources, a first-rate education for one's times, and the potential of giftedness, that these steer young talents into a series of experiences facilitating their development, at least within the Western world. (I hope to demonstrate this for the Bronte sisters.)

His Ancestors
It is ironic that although Chaucer's birth date was not established for many years, there is a large measure known about his ancestors, telling us that they were substantial citizens in their own right because this information about them predated Chaucer by many years. The Chaucer family is known to have been citizens in Ipswich in the late 1200's (Manly, 1928). The first family member we are certain of kept a tavern. He was Andrew de Dynyngton, "alias A. le Taverner" (dc. 1288). He was prominent enough for there to be a record of his marrying "Isabella Malyn, daughter of Walter Aunifaber." We also learn a surprising number of details. They had three living children: Geoffrey's paternal grandfather, Robert le Chaucer (c. 1288-1314), a daughter, Agnes (who married Walter de Westhale, then a Geoffrey Stace), and a third child. Although the third child's name is missing, the two whose names are known had to be important enough to be traceable because it was common in those years for the names of peasant and middle-class families to change from one generation to another as their members shifted their residences, their occupations, or even their neighbors and friends, in which case they might name a family member for some physical or behavioral peculiarity they spotted and fixed upon (e.g., a "Mr. Redhead" who is mentioned in the Bronte's biography [Frank, 1990]).

Soon the Chaucer's of Ipseich were trading in wine and wool from the low countries. Even though the earliest family names were at one time or other "Malyn" or "de Dynyngton," early in the 1300's the Ipswich branch from which "our" Chaucer descendants took the name of Chaucer. It is not clear why, if this was done on the basis of trade, because chausses refers to shoes and hose. This complicates matters, as there is no record that any of Geoffrey's relatives were engaged in this trade (Robinson, 1957). What is most agreed upon is that by late in the thirteenth century the Chaucers had established themselves in London, and soon afterward Robert le Chaucer, the grandfather, born Robert de Dynyngton, deliberately took the name "Chaucer" as his when he was named unexpectedly a beneficiary in his murdered master's will (John le Chaucer). This was done for two reasons: as a show of gratitude and esteem for John le Chaucer and as a show of his new financial and commercial status. All of Geoffrey's immediate male ancestors--grandfather, step-grandfather, and father Thomas, once living in London-- became prosperous wine merchants, who continued to rise socially through trade and their connections with royalty. As early as 1310 an ancestor, Robert Chaucer, was appointed customs collector of wines from France; by 1338, just before Geoffrey Chaucer's birth, his father John was attending Edward II; in 1348 during the plague, he was collecting duties for the King's customs as deputy butler in Southampton. Two facts about Chaucer's life are already established by this time. The family was almost always employed by the King's officers who collected duties on imports and exports. The Chaucer family for a century--before and after Geoffrey's birth--are either in the wine and wool trade or working with the Royal customs. As a consequence of this, family members acquired familiarity with non-English countries' customs and languages. This knowledge was part and parcel with this family's everyday life and accounts for the Chaucer family being more cosmopolitan than most. Although the bulk of the family's prosperity came from being wine merchants, in terms of Geoffrey it was far more significant that it was associated with the count because this standing became extremely vital in Chaucer's formal and informal education over the years.

Grandparents
The other side of the family, the Staces, were relatives who matched well with the Chaucers in social and occupational status. Another grandfather, Thomas Stace, was also the King's butler in Ipswich, eventually enlarging his duties to all seaports between Ipswich and the Thames. To add to the similarity between the Chaucers and the Staces, Thomas Stace also had a son named Thomas who collected wine and wool duties between 1331-1339 between Yarmouth and Ipswich. I go into these details for a reason: it is hard to minimize the wealth and prestige of these positions. Records show that grandfather Stace and a second son of his also named Geoffrey "were repeatedly" members of parliament. As we see, the Staces, too, were a family very much upwardly mobile and although there was no "middle-class" as we know it, by Geoffrey's birth the Chaucers were clearly bourgeois.

Chaucers Own Parents
His father was John (c. 1312-1366), his mother Agnes (c. ?-1381). We have clear ideas about the father's ancestors. We know also that Geoffrey's mother brought her own assets as well. For one thing, she was related to and heir of a minor royal family while part of her resources also came from being married once before John. The first husband was named Northwell and he too was involved with royalty as keeper of the King's wardrobe as well as for the Prince of Wales; for a short time he was also a baron of the exchequer. As baron of the exchequer he could not have been poorly educated, and he is believed to have directly influenced Geoffrey's own education (Manly, 1928, pp. 3-6). (There is evidence according to Manly that yet another Chaucer relative years earlier was in royal service as a nurse of Prince Lionel.) The importance of all this is simple. These many early connections of services to the royal family most likely led to Geoffrey's own appointment at age 16 as a page in Prince Lionel's and the Countess of Ulster's household. Soon promoted to an esquire to the King, thus began his lifelong career with English Royalty.

There is an odd episode in these family annals that gives us insight into just how important money was to both sides of Chaucer's family. John Chaucer was kidnapped in 1324 when he was less than 12 years old. The reason for it was money. But this was money to be kept in the extended family. His kidnapers were two Staces plus his aunt Agnes who was then a widow. When she was brought into court the reason given was that she had a daughter Joan to whom she wanted John married, thereby to be sure to keep money and property in her family. This failed because during the lawsuit, Agnes married again and her new husband, Geoffrey Stace, was forced to pay a large fine as well as to let John go. (Some historians believe Geoffrey Chaucer is named for him, but can only speculate why.)

The first Agnes Chaucer soon died and John Chaucer married another Agnes, Agnes de Northwell, who was a widow some believe had already at least one child. Her importance to Geoffrey's early life goes beyond being wealthy and inheriting two very valuable London properties. Obviously she brought additional financial resources and security to the Chaucers. But far more important for our purposes, Geoffrey was the only child of this marriage and raised as an only son. (Late in the seventeenth century evidence of a possible younger sister, Katherine, appears [Pearsall, 1992], but she never figures in any biographies.)

By the time Geoffrey Chaucer is born, his father is well-known and a successful wine merchant who would remain active in the city's business community for the rest of his life. Eventually he became a Freeman (a citizen honored with freedom and privileges) of the city of London (Pearsall, 1992). At this point we can say that Chaucer's family had risen into the upper-middle class as it existed at this time.

Family Facilitators of Chaucer's Talents
What can we say about Chaucer's advantages? They were few in number but extremely powerful in influence. First, he was an only son who was, as far as we know, on good terms with his parents, however they might have gotten along with each other. Here one needs to keep in mind that marriages in Chaucer's time were far more commercial arrangements than they were romantic alliances. Romantic love might be the stuff of poetry and heroes; it had yet to make its appearance in lives and circumstances closer to home.

Secondly, we know he was a member of a family that was ambitious, hardworking, trustworthy, remarkably honest and successful for its times, and, just as important, socially adept on both sides. These were very able families. There is not a failure, thief, or fool mentioned among them. From the first that we learn of them they are respected for their industry and integrity. There may have been some members who died early, or drifted off not to be heard from, or were of middling abilities, but those we know of who, on a direct hereditary line to Chaucer, are noted for their energy, abilities to seize opportunities for advancement, steadiness of purpose, and strong personalities and character. Contrary to some opinions, the fourteenth century was noted for its social mobility; a family could and a few did go from merchants to Earldom in two generations. This was widely known and taken as a lesson. Furthermore, Chaucer acquired from his family a remarkable secular open-mindedness, and an avid interest in the social life about him.

There is, however, one threat to all of this and this is the Black Death. What was riot controllable was the reoccurrences of the bubonic plague throughout the fourteenth century in 1348-9, 1361, 1368-9, 1371, 1390 and 1405 after Chaucer's death. It was especially deadly in 1348-9. One's chances of survival were helped immensely by one thing--one's wealth and place of residence. Here again his family makes a contribution, the extent of which we cannot really measure, but we have already learned that in 1348 when the plague was exceptionally virulent, Chaucer's family was away from London where it was most prevalent, working in Southampton for the King's butler, and they did not return to London until the plague had clearly subsided. But there was a psychological side to this survival. According to both Pearsall (1992) and Richmond (1992), "Historians often argue that the horrors of pestilence made late medieval men and women preoccupied with death and filled their art and literature with fantasies of mortality, but the most striking historical consequence," whatever the repeated losses and bereavements, "of the Black Death among survivors seems to have been a sharper appetite for a better life." It was good to be alive in the fullest sense of the word. And lively appetites teem in Chaucer's work. If the plague brought dread to all and death to many, it also brought renewed piety and relief, excitement and opportunities to the survivors, and it is possible to read various Canterbury Tales (e.g., the Parson's Tale, the Clerk's Tale) as "practical treatises" in moral and personal religious matters. As Richmond (1992) points out, the pilgrimage expressed this for Chaucer and other survivors best of all.

Chaucer's Education: Formal and Informal
I have spoken of Chaucer's family. There is one dimension to it that is not known. There is next to nothing recorded or speculated about its inner life: its feelings and dynamics. Richmond (1992) says that there are almost 500 items recorded in Chaucer Life Records for the years 1360 to his death on Oct. 25, 1400, but they are about his public life and career, not his private life or his writing. This speaks volumes of the times and its orientations. This gap is surprising when we see how much is known about the external life of this man and his family. It is impossible to believe that people did not experience or know of this inner life. But oddly the earliest and clearest proof of this is in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Before them it seems that there was no language or everyday context to put these experiences in. This is where travel and education meet. The Chaucer's were unafraid to travel and resettle; they did this often. Empirical evidence (Grey, 1992; Lynn, 1983) tells us that those persons who did move and migrate in earlier years were generally somewhat smarter and more daring than those who remained rooted when there were means and opportunities available to migrate. The earliest Chaucers fit this description.

However, there is another family resource available to Chaucer. It is that Chaucer, in the words of Pearsall (1992, p. 16), "was not only exceptionally fortunate in having a settled home when he was young and in having parents who survived until he was well into manhood," but, equally important, his father and other family members were in the King's service. This is where Geoffrey received the better part of his life-long education. It is highly questionable that he went to the best of schools available at that time, the Almonny School of St. Paul's Cathedral, only blocks from his home. More likely as a child in a family with resources and ambitions, he was taught the alphabet and soon "to read and write" and then at seven he was sent "to a grammar school" which taught him Latin and other subjects such as Aesop's Fables, moral apophlhegms, Virgil, and as much extensive reading as was possible. Although not a scholar" in the narrow sense of the word, records show that Chaucer was an idiosyncratic but widely read young man, always borrowing books and translations. A characteristic of his reading that soon became important to his own writing was the use of French translations of some Latin writers whenever he could find them (Dunn, 1952; Manly, 1928). (For some time it was believed that Chaucer was university trained because of his art; he did know several university learned men, but scholars now accept it as fact that he was not one of them.) Yet his wide learning, records, and references in his own writing show that he was curious enough to find books and information on his own. Using his own resources as he did is extremely important because it kept Chaucer from being hammered into the formal, scholastic educational mold of the times. From the earliest, with the books his family made available to him, Chaucer was able to exercise his independence of mind as he filled and educated it. And it is at this point when his family connections have perhaps their greatest influence in his life. When he joins the royal household, "Geoffrey undoubtedly received...the education which the household of a king, or one of the greater magnates, could give to its junior members." (Quoted in Pearsall, 1992, p. 34), so that if we wish to locate where and how Chaucer's education occurred we must look at court, not in a church academy.

Nor does it end in the court. From 1356 when he was 16 until near his death in 1400, Chaucer was continuously in the service of the king and other nobility (Dunn, 1952; Skeat, 1929). Learning to speak and write in French was a critical step. Once established in court (circa 1360) he was soon asked to write occasional poems for his masters, and because of his own ambition, knowing they were the favored poets, he made deliberate efforts to learn from the French poets who lived at court. His careers as courier and poet merge. Soon after on his diplomatic missions to Italy (circa 1372) he learns of and from Dante, Petrach, and Boccaccio whose works were the models and inspiration to Chaucer's early masterwork, Troilus and Criseyda (circa 1381-86), the first great English love poem. Much of its form and conceits are derivative, but not its language. What adds to Troilus and Criseyda's interest for us is that it followed by ten years his first successful court poem, The Book of the Duchess, written between 1368-69 when Chaucer was 28-29 years old. There are two significant aspects to this. The first is that this early poem's success definitely encourages Chaucer to aspire to be a poet (Bloom, 1985); secondly, the age at which it is written (28-29) fits the usual age of appearance of many first important works (Albert, 1975, 1992). Another aspect where his informal but broad "education" had its influence on Chaucer was in his written language. Critics, early in the fifteenth century, noted an immediacy to his writing that was until then rare and a vocabulary that was extremely rich (Dunn, 1952). What we see here is that by his early 20's, Chaucer's education and his travels were really one and the same process in his personal and artistic developments. The one fed the other. In this melding, they are similar to the identity formation and creative behavior of other eminent-to-be persons which often emerge, until they are two sides of one another (cf. Albert, 1990, 1992 for discussion of this process).

Chaucer's Influence
I wish to point out one indirect reason why we know so much of his works and so little of his contemporaries. Without a doubt Chaucer was an original writer opening up both English literature and language moving it off its older Anglo-Saxon themes and mixture of Old English and French languages (Abrams, 1986). Great as this was there is a more practical basis for Chaucer's early widespread fame and remarkable influence. Before printing was widely available in Europe, every author had to look for patrons wealthy and willing to pay the costs of their books being prepared by hand (Dunn, 1952). From his earliest years as a page, Chaucer's abilities and industriousness were noted and rewarded with promotion and Royal gifts of money. He did not lack for patrons and therefore printers.

Another practical "fact" that was influential in Chaucer's growth as a writer and his breakthrough influences in English letters was the small sizes and populations of England and London during his life, especially London's. Its population was estimated to between 35,000-40,000 and its area one square mile (Pearsall, 1992; Richmond, 1992). When one realizes this one can appreciate how influential this was in assisting him to become knowledgeable with a wide variety of dialects, people, and occupations. Although England was nearly all rural, once Chaucer was in contact with the Royal household he was in almost daily contact with different types of people along with many of the important and better educated men (and some women) of the times. It would have been difficult to avoid them in his duties. This had two consequences for his development and his work. The first we know already--Chaucer's education was far broader and more secular than it would have been if he were not an active member of the court. What he experienced and observed was richer than what other merchants' sons had available. The second consequence of this was his daily immersion in the Court and London life. He conversed in two worlds until they became one. Although it is clear we know little about Chaucer's personality, we do see something that occurs time and again in many creative lives. At some point in a person's personal development career events, opportunities, relationships converge and together take on a momentum of their own. This synergy has a force and organization of its own. And most important, it gives "style" to the individual's work and an identity to the person.

In order to appreciate his life accomplishments we must remember that Chaucer was born on the lower rungs of a growing middle-class but dies renting a house (a 53 year lease) from the King in Westminster Abby's garden, adjacent to Westminster Hall, England's ancient seat of government (Abrams, 1986). In between, he was a trusted and regularly promoted royal servant plus being a poet all of his adult years. It would give social symmetry to his life if we could say that he finally attained a place in the aristocracy, but he did not. His finances were too beholden to the Court. One of his two sons, Thomas, however, showed the same high social and political acumen as his father. He rose even higher in the social order of the times, becoming one of the wealthiest men in England and a long-serving member of parliament and its Speaker twice. His own son, John, Chaucer's grandson, is said to have shown much of "the Chaucerian family skill in manoevre" (Pearsall, 1992, p. 283). There were other descendants of recorded lesser rank and diminished skill. Ironically, Geoffrey Chaucer's direct line dies out just after his first collected Workes is published in 1532.

Secondly, how significant are the parents' active presence and emotional involvements in the development of an exceptionally gifted child's capacities for sustained creativity? As a test of this issue, I selected the eighteenth century prodigy Thomas Chatterton, who was born just months after his father's sudden death.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770): A "Marvelous Boy's" Suddenly Aborted Talent
In his short life (17 years and 9 months) and from the meagerest environment, Chatterton created both some truly remarkable poetry, especially the "Rowley Poems," and more intense interest and outrage in others than probably any other literary person or years. Nor was this interest and rage limited to the citizens of Bristol, England where he was born and lived most of his life. It came to involve such major poets such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats, and earlier the important critic Horace Walpole. Nor was his career just a peculiar literary event. His life and the creativity that appeared in it would be taken seriously. Just how serious is measured by the ten double-columned pages devoted to him compared to the twelve and half for Chaucer in the 1887 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography. It is easy enough to understand the earliest interest in Chatterton given his short productive life, the "false" identities he took as author of some of his work, but the fact is that interest in him continues into our time. As recently as 1973 he received eight double-columned pages to Chaucer's seven in the Dictionary of National Biography. The difference is not the result of Chaucer living 350 years earlier than Chatterton and therefore there are fewer facts available about Chaucer. A trip to any good library will disprove this. Nor is this difference because Chatterton lived nearer our times that we remain interested in his work and influence. Chatterton's literary influence ills far short of Chaucer's on any scale. For all of its immense power, Chatterton's career mysteriously appeared almost out of nowhere with few developmental signals and no family anticipation.

If we look only at the drama of this young man's life then we end with the answer that, Calhoun and I fear, nothing in or from a family clearly matters. If this is so, a lot has be rethought at least by me. Nonetheless, the quality and quantity of first rate work Chatterton produced in so short a life is truly remarkable. In some ways he is a "literary" Mozart. And like Mozart we see the same remarkably early, apparently unaided creative artist. But there is one difference between the two. In trying to understand Chatterton's career we come upon an example of how identity and creativity does not necessarily develop well together; how a too lop-sided and poorly integrated creativity and identity may leave the individual unable to moderate the demands of one with the counter dances of the other; while there may be an inordinate degree of self-awareness, there not enough self-regulation of it (Kopp, 1982).

Some of the problems in catching explicit steps in this process results from Chatterton's own deceptions, from himself, perhaps, and certainly from others. His most remarkable works Chatterton had originally attributed to a fifteenth century priest, Thomas Rowley. Their quality and number convinced others and for a long time there was no effort to trace them to Chatterton himself. After all, he was in his early teens when they began to appear. Moreover, part of the difficulty in tracing them to Chatterton lay in the difficulty believing that so young a person could have composed such "wonderful" works. This skepticism was strengthened if one knew anything about his family and his own erratic education. In this instance we see the influence of stereotypes regarding social class and the "mystery" of genius of the time (Addison, 1983; Becker, 1992). Even if some persons could have gotten past these stereotypes I think it is doubtful they would have understood the psychological issues involved. For it is another century before a language and model is available in which to phrase the questions and pursue their answers. And as it is common knowledge now in so many cases of creative behavior, the motivations behind them are important to an understanding of their meaning and consequences.

Chatterton's Ancestors
Unlike other persons I have studied on the surface there is little known or established family history for this boy and his family. The one fact that always gets played up is that his father, Thomas Chatterton, Senior, died three months before his son was born. What does not get the attention it deserves is that this posthumous son was named for his father and was the last of three children. There is his sister Mary four years older. But more important is a baby boy named Giles Malpas who lived about a year and died approximately a year or a year and a half before his brother Thomas was born (Meyerstein, 1930; Nevill, 1948). Few writers either mention this earlier son or acknowledge that Thomas was this family's only surviving male, much less born into a grieving, depressed home that had suffered in quick succession two sudden deaths. The date of Giles' death is not established, but this should not account for it not being discussed in Chatterton biographies. Furthermore, rarely is Thomas referred to as a junior. Put together, this makes for a very sketchy and superficial family history.

Although this particular part of the Chatterton history is not given in much detail, one aspect is. For nearly two hundred years the Chattertons were closely affiliated as workers and neighbors with a small church named St. Mary Radcliffe. They were anchored and not rootless. (The Chatterton family has been traced as far back as 1403 [Meyerstein, 1930]). But what really mattered in Chatterton's development as a poet was that this small parish church was founded in 1533 by one of Bristol's richest and most esteemed citizens at the time, William Canynge. For years there had existed some biographic records of him, and when Thomas learns of him he becomes the focus of a few of Thomas' earliest eulogies and soon after his history becomes the link between real-life and young Chatterton's own imaginary history of Bristol. Once he learned that both Canynge and a priest Rowley might have been connected in real life, this led Chatterton to his "discovery" of the unknown poet--the Priest, Thomas Rowley (see the Dictionary of National Biography 1973, vol. 4; Russell, 1909 for concise accounts of these steps.) Rowley becomes Chatterton's mask and Canynge his "patron."

Father and Mother
The male Chattertons, up to the time of Thomas Chatterton's birth in 1752 had been its "hereditary" sextons. It is upon this fact that the second aspect of this church's importance for Thomas stands. Even the most forgiving of biographers do not claim that Chatterton's father was a diligent father, the most inspiring teacher, or a stay-at-home husband and father. For the most part he had little love for his family, less to do with his family, but a lot to do at the local taverns entertaining others when he was not being too unruly. Be that as it may, the same biographies also tell us he was a man of uncommon ability, of some musical talent (enough to compose popular drinking songs), "a writer of verse," and extremely fond of books, constantly borrowing them. Drunk, sober, or on his way to either, he was capable enough to fulfill the position of sexton well enough to have a home for his family and access throughout the church. One biographer and no friend of this family calls the father a man of "varied abilities," and quotes one of his former pupils that, "All of the family were proud," and sums him up "as a man of talent, but an unkind husband..." The convivial habits ascribed to him were common enough in his age; but his abilities and favorite pursuits appear to have been far above his associates (Wilson, 1869, pp. 4-5). The mother (Sarah Young), a farmer's daughter, has been described as plain. But according to several persons, she was able to read and write, which was uncommon for women in those days whether or not they were more elevated socially than she. It is believed that she attempted to teach her son to read and write with little success (Meyerstein, 1930). It is not unusual for very precocious children to do this themselves (Albert, 1980a). What we do know is that she was surprised when she noticed how spontaneously he learned to do both. Probably more important was her character. She was even tempered, loyal, and "moderated" affection to her children. I take this as a clear "plus" considering her circumstances and the fact that she was married when she was only 16 and soon had babies and an ill-tempered husband to deal with. From what little we know she did well because when her husband died she was thought well enough of to be allowed to remain about a year in their little house. Afterward, she, her two children, and an old friend, Mrs. Edkins who lived with them, moved to "a dark old house" where she opened a sewing school for children. At this time, she is said to have invented needlework designs which she drew and taught to her neighbors (Nevill, 1948). Obviously, she was resourceful, but it goes deeper than this. The models for her designs came from her husband's folios and pieces of church parchment, the same ones that would spark her son's attention three years later.

Although not as clearly "talent-rich" as, say, the Eliots or Ellingtons, it is no exaggeration to say these parents were intelligent persons, each a reader and a writer, each as best they could trying to make a solid life for themselves, and each having some degree of talent, which we find later displayed by their son. The father's, in reading, singing, and composing "slight" musical pieces; the mother's also in reading and creating "original" designs, come together in Thomas by way of his father's books, folios, and especially the parchments his father had taken (some say "stole") when they were stored in St. Mary Radcliffe. So unimportant and unremarkable were these parchments to others that no one complained and Thomas' mother even used parts of them for her sewing patterns. Yet from what writers tell us and from Thomas' reaction to them they were far from ordinary.

Cognitive Development
In the case of Chatterton, his cognitive development and artistic career were close to being one and the same. His cognitive development shifted abruptly at age six and half, and between ages 8 and 10, he was constantly "making" literature. Several catalysts to these transformations were involved. The first one was in the home where he discovered (for the first time?) his father's musical folios, books, and the parchments, taking them into his attic room for his sole use. The second catalyst compliments the first; it is far more public.

Just turned 10 in the winter of 1762, Thomas was confirmed by none other than the Bishop of Bristol in a ceremony said to have deeply impressed the boy in its usual splendor and rituals. Soon afterward (by age 11) he was writing a series of religious poems (e.g. "A Hymn for Christmas Day"), sending them anonymously to local journals in which they were published. From then on until his death Chatterton's literary output was steady. However, I want to emphasize that, precocious as his work was, it was not as sudden a transformation of "childish" efforts into art as it appears. There had been cognitive and emotional readiness in place for several years.

Long before the confirmation, when Chatterton was 4 to 5 years old, he had quite literally "fallen in love with" and was intensely preoccupied over his then newly discovered musical folios of his father. What is clear is that this was a two-part discovery: first the elaborate lettering an designs of the folios themselves and secondly that they were his father's (Dictionary of National Biography, 1887; Meyerstein, 1930; Nevill, 1948), making them perfect transitional objects (Winnicott, 1971), an object of great psychological and emotional significance for a child standing in symbolically for a parent or other significant person. Winnicott (1971) makes two observations about these objects which describe perfectly what might have taken place in the child. They are created as "symbolic" by the child; such transitional objects give the child confidence (i.e. encourages the child to keep developing into an unknowable future). Soon afterward, as we'll see, Chatterton comes out of his apathetic state and learns to read and write.

Thomas Chatterton's Precocious Period of Immersion
We find in Chatterton's transformation of a latent giftedness what we can see in the early years of other richly creative persons such as Eliot (Albert, 1992), Chaucer, arid Ellington, the early interplay and intermixing of formal and informal educations. This also appears in the early years of other creative youth not yet into careers (Albert, in press; Albert & Spangler, 1992). What is remarkable in Chatterton's development is that when we put together his age and creative activities, his period of immersion takes place much earlier than most. This is essential for accounting for his productivity in so short and young an age span (age 10 to 17).

One needs to understand that immersion is both a process and a product. As process it is the active, deliberate involvement in and exploration of the intricacies and range of possibilities in one's preferred interest, whatever this might be. As a product, it is the tested and validated understanding of the fit between one's preferred domain of involvement and its requirements. It is common that this period runs for about ten years and ends in public product or accomplishment of identifiable originality during the early to mid-twenties (Albert, 1975, 1992; Raskin, 1936). Obviously, in Chatterton's life this period's length and abundance is aborted by his suicide at age 17 years 9 months; we'll never know where it all might have led, artistically.

But there is an aspect of this early childhood period that we can understand. If we look at Chatterton's whole life, the circumstances of his birth and his family, and the powerful pull that his absent father had in his emotional and creative development as well as the identity gap the dead father left and the son sought to fill with fame and patron's recognition, we see that although his immersion was as intense and earlier than most, it failed to give him the one experience he needed to carry off: a living model with whom to identity and thereby challenge and integrate parts of his own over-blown sense of self. A living male model would have forced upon Chatterton accommodations, real-life competitions of all sorts, and resulted in a mix of achievement and failure from which he could have learned to appreciate his own talents and experiences as they related to others. From these real-life demands he might have acquired a workable degree of self-discipline, which he definitely lacked. This would have helped him think through his problems as alternatives to the deadend hopelessness he found. In fact, it is easy to imagine for Chatterton a developmental sequence similar to John Smart Mills in which intrusive fathering threatened great precocity, led to depression, eventually "self-cure" at age 22, and the beginning of a life of his own. Chatterton's sequence might have been more volatile and risky given Chatterton's father's temperament and his own. But without the metacognitive skills, the self-esteem, and the environmental supports which we know could protect against or at least modify his risks (Rutter, 1989), his suicide is not that surprising according to contemporary studies (Neiger, 1988; Sterling & Edelmann, 1988).

Chatterton's Emotional Development
Distinct as they are, like any child's, Chatterton's emotional and cognitive developments and early home environment are interrelated from birth. In order to put a frame of reference to his precocious, if erratic, development, I will give a chronology of his emotional and cognitive behavior. In his earliest day, Chatterton was noted for his extreme need to dominate his playmates--he being their "master" and they being his "hired servants" (Nevill, 1948). According to his earliest biographers who rely mainly on his sister and mother for this information, at this time there was absolutely nothing remarkable or interesting in his early cognitive development unless it is the lack of anything "worthy of record" according to the anonymous authors of The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton (1857, vol. 1). A number of other writers agree with this but it is "worthy of record" primarily when what is known of his early childhood is compared with his tremendous burst of productive creative precocity at age 10. By age 4 it is true that he had learned only "one or two letters of the alphabet" (DNB, 1973, p. 144) and it is equally true that after a short trial at age 5, the master of his school quickly returned Thomas home because he was, in his estimation, "dull-witted," and "incapable of any improvement;" to add insult to injury (of pride), to a large extent both his mother and older sister agreed. Up to that time they had seen no sign of general alertness or focused interests in this little boy. About all that is recalled by them of Chatterton at this age, (and since repeated by biographers) were his eyes, which throughout his life startled children and adults. They were described as "a kind of hawk's eye." An anatomist in Bristol who knew the family said he had never before seen such eyes with "fire rolling at the bottom of them." He used to provoke Chatterton simply to see Chatterton's eyes "strike fire, kindle, and blaze up" (Nevill, 1948, p. 16). Bright-eyed or not, his mother believed that Thomas, until age six and a half was "little better than an absolute fool" (DN7B, 1973, p. 144).

At this point we know enough to introduce an alternative explanation for young Chatterton's behavior. The signs of giftedness and a drive for creativity were present quite early but what seems to obscure them from others is knowing the unusual home circumstances in which they develop. I have already dealt with symbolic and imaginative ways Chatterton relates to his father, especially when he learns of the father's own behavior and ties with Bristol the city and St. Mary Radcliffe the Church. Knowing that he was not born of dull or uneducated parents, but was born only three months after his father's sudden, if not widely mourned, death, I believe that all of the disruptions of this boy's earliest years, florid as some of these descriptions are, are detailed enough to point to a depressed infant and child. His mother had been described before his birth as both intelligent and chronically melancholy. She had every right to be depressed after losing only a year or so earlier a baby and living with a man who didn't care to live with her or his children, conditions that often exacerbate depressive predisposition in women (McGrath, Keita, Strickland, & Russo, 1990). Now she had only a young daughter and a newborn for a family.

A description of Thomas in those earliest years describes a depressed child, not a retarded one. It is not unusual for depression to occur as early as the second year. Especially where the mother has her own deprivation and saddened emotional state to contend with this home "atmosphere" can lead to unintentional neglect of the baby (Rutter, 1980). From the evidence there is reason to believe that these were strong possibilities for Chatterton. If further proof is necessary, the student of Bowlby (1969) will note in the following description the stages of a child's reaction to loss-protest, despair, and detachment.

In these years he was a strange boy, loving solitude and his own thoughts, mostly without boy playmates or play, often silent and abstracted, sometimes speechless for so much as two days together, startling plain people (as were his mother's friends) by looking fixedly at them evidently without seeing them, absorbed in contemplation, Shutting himself into the attic with a book, refusing food, and like abnormalities. He had a disconcerting way of sitting in company with his eyes fixed on vacancy while the 'important affairs of the neighborhood' the price of butter and like pertinent topics, were discussed about him, and then returning suddenly from a far journey to ask what had been talked about. He was sometimes so absent-minded and far gone in his abstraction that he did not hear when he was directly addressed. He was ordinarily most truthful and obedient, but his mother and sister noted that he would fall sometimes into violent fits of weeping for no apparent cause and when pressed to know what he would be at a loss for an answer and say he had been beaten when there was no such matter. He seemed in a way to have had no youth, for he passed from infancy to a state where with mature gravity and knowledge he talked of abstruse subjects and bore himself with a dignity and presence that seem to have moved some observers to wonder and some to amusement. (Russell, 1909, pp. 26-27)

Just before his seventh birthday an emotional breakthrough took place. While watching his mother tear up his dead father's old, brilliantly decorated French musical folio with its elegant lettering and illuminated capital, he seemed to literally snap awake. His mother said he "fell in love" with his father's manuscript (The Poetical Works, 1857, vol. 1). Immediately afterward he learned to read. By age seven, others had noticed his "brightness;" with this confirmation both mother and sister came to adore him. By age eight he read insatiably, devouring books from wherever he could find them. That is except what he called "small" books. The larger the better. Yet the bouts of depression continued to appear. As we learned he was known to sit sad, staring into space, and silent for several days until, for no apparent reason, he burst into loud crying (much like J. S. Mills did in his depressed late teens). Two items reported in biographies are interesting here, and I believe connected to his depression and its relief. When his mother and sister asked him what was the matter, he often was unable to given any immediate answer but would only say that he had been beaten although the mother and sister knew this was not so. These moods continued over the years subsiding as Chatterton's reading and writing abilities became increasingly better and the reliable source of his homegrown knowledge and self-sufficiency. Eventually we see that the depressions were "overtaken" by bursts of tremendous energy and imaginative activity. Appearing at the same time and psychologically fitting with this is a second interesting change in Thomas' behavior. This was a streak of ambition (or omnipotence?). He now not only was "lord" over his few playmates as he had done since age 5, but now when he and his sister were offered gifts of earthenware and asked what it should be, according to his sister who was there, Thomas rejected a picture of a lion and immediately said, "Paint me! Paint me an angel, with wings and a trumpet, to trumpet my name over the world." (Dictionary of National Biography, 1973; The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton, 1857; Russell, 1909). We know from others that the Chattertons, especially Thomas, Sr., was "full of pride." But there is more to his son's arrogance and demands than a family trait passing on. We see in some children, usually bright to begin with, who have been raised in a household of over-concerned, adoring women who treat and teach the child he is "special" (Millon, 1981) several at-risk developmental consequences. "They learn to expect obedience from others;" the family literally revolves around them; they do not acquire the ability to self-control, nor to see a need to do so (i.e. early feelings of entitlement and superiority leading in a sense of grandiosity). When this develops, no matter how talented, this person runs the risk of failure from not meeting his own standards and from not convincing others of his superiority; this is exactly what Chatterton experienced repeatedly during his last two years before his suicide (Kaplan, 1988; Meyerstein, 1930).

From age seven on, Chatterton was no dullard to anyone. He read everything and his favorite place for reading and writing was in St. Mary Radcliffe where his father had been employed and where now an uncle, Richard Phillips, was the sexton and indulged Thomas' love of privacy. When he was found in the church it was most frequently at Canynge's tomb.

Just before he turned eight years old, Chatterton was singled out with a nomination to the prestigious Coliston Blue Coat School of Bristol and with little fanfare was admitted as a scholar. At the time this school was the most prominent school in Bristol. It had gained a great reputation since opening in July, 1710. Perhaps, even more important for young Chatterton, it was his father's old school. How well this bit of history played, no one says, but it is agreed that young Chatterton at first looking forward to this school very soon was extremely disappointed by it. From all we know it was not much different from and in some ways far better than the majority of schools of its times, but this didn't make it any easier for Chatterton to accept it or try to fit into its theologically orientated, restricted, and practical curriculum. According to him the problem was its rigid conventional regimen. Chatterton was vocal at home and at school in denouncing it for its limited number of courses, its standardization of lessons and practices, and far worst of all its obvious denial of imagination and individualism throughout. The best of a conventional education was not for him any more than it was four hundred years earlier for Chaucer or fifty years later for the Brontes or Charles Dickens. More stimulation, freedom, and variety was needed by these gifted children. They knew it, demanded it, and found it for themselves.

Where did this rebellious self-schooling lead? It is during summer 1764 (age 12) that Chatterton first mentioned to anyone certain very old manuscripts in Canynge's offers in St. Mary Radcliffe. He claimed that this "discovery" was of some very old printing that were ancient poems. For years they were accepted as ancient writings but research after his death showed that they were all written by Chatterton himself soon after he was 12 year old. Unknown to any one else he had taught himself to "decode" medieval English and had been reading old English dictionaries and Chaucer's poems and Canterbury Tales from which he made up a dual glossary of old and modern words (the "modernized" version of the "old" and the "old" version of the "modern" word), Out of this he wrote in so consistent an "ancient" language the "Rowley Poems," which astounded and convinced scholars and public alike of their authenticity for years. What we know now but they never guessed was that by 1765 (age 14) Chatterton had taught himself to read and write fourteenth century English, and from this foundation began the most imaginative and convincing of all his creative efforts: Learning of the existence of the fifteenth century priest Thomas Rowley, Chatterton had created the Rowley Poems and much more until to his suicide three years later, alone in London, and away from home for the first time in his life.

So what does it add up to? Are Calhoun and I right to worry? There is, for me, one indisputable lesson that Chatterton's life and career teaches by example, and this is how crucial and exhausting it is for even the most gifted youth to construct a real identity for him or herself. The fact that most (creative) persons do this at least well enough to have long careers should not blind us to its difficulties or just how far short the effort can fall when done alone.

The third question is broader than the other two insofar as it centers upon the family's culture, Do any of these parameters appear among American minorities? To answer this question I examined the family history of Duke Ellington, the eminent African American composer.

Edward Kennedy Ellington (1899-1974): The Duke
Like Chaucer's and Chatterton's histories, Ellington's is also something of a test for us, Whereas the two previous were in literature and were White, Ellington is African American and in jazz music. Some would say popular music, therefore this doesn't count. But it does count, because this particular music is, a long with baseball and motion pictures, one of the few cultural inventions that is clearly American in origin and not derived from some other culture (Hobson, 1939). Moreover, Ellington, the Duke, is one of the few men we can point to and say that although he was not at jazz's birth, he was a major influence in it staying alive and becoming an integral part of America's culture and everyday life.

In his collection of portraits in jazz, American Musicians, Whitney Balliett (1986) quotes Harold Rosenberg's observations about the great American primitive artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "All works of folk art exist simultaneously in the peaceable kingdom of individual imagination and skill." For Balliett this holds true for "the most startling and original members of this primitive art (jazz), which includes Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Erroll Garner" (p. 266).

It is fruitless to argue over who is the most influential innovator in this history, but by most accounts Ellington is one of the two or three names most often mentioned in jazz history. He is mentioned more often than any one else by other famous jazz musicians in any type of book on jazz (e.g. Eustice & Rubin's (1992) Jazz Spoken Here Carr, Fairweather, & Priestley's (1987) encyclopedic book of 1600 biographies of jazz participants from the earliest days until its publication). In this book, Ellington's is the longest entry. A second empirical index of Ellington's importance to jazz is the number of compositions copyrighted in his name. The first was in 1923 when he was 24 years old and the last was in 1973 just before he died for a total of 1012, of which he is the sole listed composer of 769 (Rattenbury, 1990). These compositions are not little tunes but included many of our standards such as "Mood Indigo," "Take the A Train," and "Sophisticated Lady," to say nothing of his so-called serious pieces and film soundtracks. Once into this particular study I found that relatively few jazz greats are subjects to serious biographies. This tells us that the history of jazz, which is so linked with individual performers and small groups that come and go within a year or two has not reached the same degree of scholarly interest as other parts of American culture, (The most sustained scholarly, "serious" interest in jazz can be found in France.) This lack of interest, seen also in films (Brownlow, 1986), can be measured against the number of books that constantly come from major publishers centered on a variety sports topics, especially baseball, and to a lesser degree, football. Nor is there any contest between the column of publications for American literature and American music, jazz. Yet this "part" of America is one of its most influential. Heard world wide, it identifies the United States in the same way as its films do. Yet for most of its ninety years, jazz has been on the periphery of mainstream American culture even as it has infused most of it.

One irony to this lack of history is that, rare for any important invention and cultural development, jazz's origins, time, and geographics, can be pinpointed (Peretti, 1992; Southern, 1971). Ellington, one of its major contributors, played an active role for nearly sixty years of its ninety years. So, to know something of his history is to know something about jazz's history. The irony here is because Ellington's own musical development differed widely from other major performers and innovators. As is true of many influential and eminent persons in other fields, "Most jazz musicians...make their greatest impact and create their best works in their early twenties, and many added little to their reputations (past age thirty). Ellington showed no such precocity," being in his early thirties before he began to be a name in jazz (Collier, 1987. p. 4).

Although there are several limitations to tracing Ellington's family history and early experiences, derived from the put-down "value" of jazz and Blacks in American culture and the fact that jazz originally came together and grew into a identifiable art form in late 1880's-early 1900's when Black culture was sealed off from main stream America, the Ellington history that we do have gives us a glimpse of an American success story if ever there is one.

Ancestors
Within two generations this family went from slavery to being literate, broadly educated, and able to move itself from poverty into a more favorable racial and economic environment. What we see in this family's history is the interplay of economics, race, and social status as they determine paths to achievement. And although the route that the Ellingtons took to the United States obviously was a far different one than the Roosevelts', the Eliots', the James', and other eminent Americans (but not for many immigrants in the late 1880's, early 1900's such as Benny Goodman's family), it has many of the same parameters to it that run through those other famous families.

For all of the social and racial differences between the Ellingtons and prominent White families, like many of them, the Ellingtons show the importance of moving to and settling in an urban environment with both its risks and its opportunities. Like other families (e.g. the Brontes, the Eliots), the Ellingtons show us that there is usually one daring person who deliberately makes the critical move out of an impoverished, closed off environment to a richer one.

All of Ellington's great grandparents are believed to have met as slaves, "taken or sold" in Virginia and South Carolina (Collier, 1987; Ellington, 1973). Sometime around 1840, Ellington's paternal grandfather was born and in 1844 his paternal grandmother was born. Immediately after the Civil War, when they would have been in their early 20's, this young couple moved their growing family and settled in a small Black town in North Carolina. It is believed that this time both grandparents were doing either casual labor or domestic work. Nevertheless, it was not long before they were able to buy a farm of their own, To make matters more difficult during the 1870's, while in his thirties, Ellington's grandfather had a series of strokes that left him paralyzed, but with the help of his children he still managed the farm and made sure that they got the best education possible. In fact, one of his brothers became a trained teacher in the local school.

Two things stand out here. Obviously education mattered to the family. Secondly, as in the histories of Chaucer and the Brontes, we see how a family in one generation may move itself to a more favorable environment in which it takes advantage of the resources found there. This is important; its long term significance is that this move sets the stage for the next generation to become better established educationally, economically, and socially. At this point in its history, other Ellington family members were more positioned to take advantage of opportunities. In the 1890's the economic and racial conditions around them in North Carolina worsened, but because of their preparation "a group of Ellington men began to migrate to Washington, D.C." (Collier, 1987, p. 7). Over the next few years others followed and Washington soon became the family hometown.

Special Birth-Order
Before discussing Ellington's family there is one particular characteristic that is important to keep in mind because it helps explain the deep impact of his ancestors and his mother and father on him. It is this: Ellington, like a surprising number of eminent persons, was preceded by an unnamed brother who had died in infancy, during 1898, only one year before Duke's own birth, making him an "only surviving son" (Albert, 1980b). Like the Eliots, the Chattertons, and the Weltys, there is no clear family record on this child, and little if anything was said about it to Duke Ellington and his sister Ruby. According to Ellington's biographer Collier (1987), the date "is not certain." Duke Ellington (1973) does not mention this in his autobiography, nor does his son Mercer (Ellington & Dance, 1978) in his book. Be that as it may, this ambiguity leaves a blank in the family emotionally and historically that is nearly identical to the family situation into which T.S. Eliot, Thomas Chatterton, and Eudora Welty were born. What gives this tremendous significance is that although Edward Kennedy (Duke) Ellington believed he was an only child, and says he was raised as an only child through his adolescence, he was not. As far as he was concerned he was a very "special" and only son, hovered over, prized, and "precious," especially to his mother and the other women in his family.

Parents
Among the first group of Ellington men to make the trip to Washington was Ellington's father, James Edward Ellington. In four years, not yet twenty years old, he got the economic opportunity of his life, and was prepared for it. He was able to work for a highly respected society doctor. Soon after starting this job James Edward met Daisy Kennedy, whose father (Ellington's maternal grandfather) was then a captain in the Washington police and already had strong political connections and a upper-middle status in the community. Ellington's maternal grandfather, James William Kennedy, was the equal of his paternal grandfather in several ways. The Ellington family legend says that he too was born a slave in Virginia. When his master freed him, (as slave owners sometimes did in cases of their half-caste sons) he moved directly to Washington, settled, and returned to Virginia for his wife. Together they both settled in Washington where they had between nine and twelve children.

Duke's father, James Edward Ellington, remained with the doctor for twenty years, after which he went to work at the Navy Yard during World War I. For some people the match between Ellington's mother and father was something of a surprise. She came from a socially advantaged family, was light skinned, beautiful, and the daughter of one of Washington's leading men. Ellington's son, Mercer (Ellington & Dance, 1978) tells us that this marriage showed strains over the years. Be that as it may, it was a "solid" one where it concerned Duke.

The family in which Duke was born was one with strong religious habits and "Victorian moral views." But equally important was the mother-child relationships established in it. The best way to give the reader a sense of the relationships is to quote Ellington himself:

Because of the fact that no one else but my sister Ruth had a mother as great and as beautiful as mine, it is difficult to put into understandable words an accurate description of my mother, Daisy...I was pampered and pampered, and spoiled rotten by all the women in the family, aunts, and cousins, but my mother never took her eyes off precious little me, her jewel, until I was four years old (when Ellington fell, cut his finger and his mother called two doctors. Ellington tells us that she stayed bedside day and night until she was sure his fever was down). (Ellington, 1973, p. 6)

When he describes his father, Ellington is less florid, but equally direct. He leaves no doubt what he saw. His mother was "beautiful" while his father "was only handsome."

"While my mother had graduated from high school, I don't think my father even finished eighth grade. Yet his vocabulary was what I always hoped mine to be. In fact, I have always wanted to be able to be and talk like my pappy" (Ellington, 1973, p. 12).

It is interesting what Ellington highlights about his parents: mother's beauty, adoration of him and devotion; father's vocabulary. Later in his book Ellington tells us that his father was also a "great" ballroom dancer, a wit, and a man who always found the right words and way to speak to woman. We are told by others that Ellington learned these skills very well and practiced them throughout his life (Collier, 1987; Ellington & Dance, 1978).

There is one important characteristic about him and his family that differs from most other jazz greats. In looking into the prevalence of "talent-rich" families among jazz musicians, (that is, evidence that other members of their family also had a talent, usually in the same domain) I find that close to 70% of them come from such families (see also Buerkle & Barker, 1973). But equally striking is that unlike Ellington and many eminent persons in other fields, jazz musicians are not more likely to be the oldest/only son than in any other birth-order. Nor are they likely to be the child of a socially or economically well-placed person. Because so many of these men (Black and White) are from relatively poor or lower middle-class families one finds among them a process of talent identification and work (not "career") choice similar to that of emigrant families struggling in the first third of this century when jazz began to develop. The loudest family encouragement and whatever possible resources it had went to the most "talented" of a family's children regardless of where he (almost always "he") came in the family order.

There is no better example of this than the life of Benny Goodman (Collier, 1989). He was the middle child of 12 children, but quite early, he was identified as being far more musically talented than the other children, including the neighbors' children as well. It was barely six-year-old Benny for whom his father searched for and managed to find free music lessons at the nearby Synagogue. Granted there was paternal pride in this but it was primarily because the father knew that during those depressed years, musicians made more money than he the father could, or ever did. Three older Goodman brothers also went into music later and with far less talent and success than Benny. In poor(er) families, it is talent and the ability to work that catches the family's attention. Interestingly, this process is also found during the earliest years of motion pictures and professional sports. And out of it, jazz, together these two other occupations rapidly made up the bulk of the nations entertainment industry long before the advent of radio and certainly before television, indicating that the sequences of talent identification and education and career choice are often different within poor and/or socially marginal families from those within middle-class and upper families. Ellington's family was not only upper-middle class in terms of Black-American society but on the basis of this, perceived him and expected from him a career far different from that of most jazz musicians, white or Black, at that time. If one wants a comparison, it is that many of his family experiences are closer to T. S. Eliot's than to Benny Goodman's.

Ellington's Education
From all evidence, Ellington's musical talent came from both sides of his family (Collier, 1989; Ellington, 1973). Both parents were talented, each in his and her own way. His mother played the piano ("pretty things...so pretty they'd make me cry"). His father also played piano but by ear and "all operatic stuff" (Ellington p. 20). Without reaching too far for a correlate to Ellington's later music, these are two stylistic characteristics that can be found in some of his later compositions. But in tracking his education, it came initially from his mother but mainly we have to acknowledge that it came primarily from himself. In spite of his early childhood falls and illnesses no one can deny that Ellington's boyhood was exceptional only in how comfortable and uneventful it was. It is one that is the complete opposite to Chatterton's. Raised in the midst of a stable, economically well-to-do family as well as being the center of attention in it and a large successful, close extended family, one can argue that Ellington started life with the best of psychological foundations.

For example, one of the most important lessons Ellington ever learned came early and from his mother. He was blessed.

Do I believe that I am blessed? Of course, I do! In the first place, my mother told me so, many, many times, and when she said it, it was always quietly, confidently. She was very soft -spoken, and I knew that anything she told me was true.... Until this day I really don't have any fears...There have been so many extraordinary and inexplicable circumstances in my life. I have always seemed to encounter the right people in the right places at the right times, and doing the right thing to give me the kind of instruction and guidance I needed. (Ellington, 1973, p. 15)

If this sounds like an echo from Freud's remarks about his mother and parts of Eliot's early years, it is. All three men were much loved and protected by their mothers early in their lives; if there is a risk in this love it is that they might have been co-opted and smothered by it. But none were and each chose a path for himself. With this sense of supreme confidence and support the other parts of Ellington's education were by choice primarily technical trimmings and basic piano skills.

What there was of it, because of his mother, Ellington's formal schooling started a year earlier than normal. She had put his age up from five to six to enroll him into the first grade. This went well enough; at the same time his mother thought Ellington should take formal piano lesson with a Mrs. Clinkscales (sic). Again things went well--for a time. But within the year it was evident that this was not a time when music or any formal instruction would be easy for Ellington. That he was bright is not a question; the problem was in his personality. As early as age six and throughout his life he was very resistant to arid scornful of formal teaching. According to persons who knew him well, Ellington did not take to strict self-discipline or the role of being the student to another person. For example, his first formal musical lessons were over almost as soon as they began, lasting no more than several months. His mother realized that he wasn't ready (or willing) to concentrate on them and withdrew him. (But did she see how resistant to them he was?) Later Ellington showed that they had not been wasted, but already we see a common theme found in almost every educational step and later career decision he took. He had to do it himself, without others' explicit or formal involvement. This is true of his choice of instrument when he become serious about music in the seventh grade. It was Ellington who selected the piano. As far as learning to play it, he also selected his teachers. When he was around age 14, Ellington heard Harvey Brooks, a pianist with a jazz reputation. It inspired him that Brooks only several years older, which may have made his identification easier (and probably a bit competitive) for Ellington.

Here is where illness also played a role in his development. Confined to his home for "a couple weeks" he used the time to "fiddle around" on the piano. This episode is typical of Ellington in another way. He was also extremely resistant to working on the intricacies of piano techniques. But freed during this confinement (age 14) he wrote his first song "Soda Fountain Rag," which was followed soon by "What You Gonna Do When The Bed Breaks Down?" With these two songs done, Ellington felt confident to go out and play parties.

Other mentors now came into Ellington's life. Between ages 15-17 Ellington sought out and listened to a series of older players in Washington. Being as socially polished and polite as he was, these men were willing to help. The first was Doc Oliver Perry who "taught" him chords; next was Henry Grant who was even more prominent than Perry in Washington music circles. He taught Ellington harmony. Not only were these men knowledgeable but just as important they knew how to handle Ellington; they were casual and informal in their instruction, taking the lead from Ellington about what he wanted while still making him aware of the technicalities he would need. Unlike in the early formal lessons, Ellington could learn in this setting. Best yet, there was a social incentive to Ellington's learning style. When he was sixteen, he was good enough to sit in for other pianists and within a year he was definitely a part of Washington's Black society, partly because of his family's connection and partly because of his own talents, socially and musically. It is clear to him and others that by this time he had found how he best learned and functioned. Although it is not pure jazz that he was learning (he could not have heard it until 1917 when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's records reached him), the music he knew then and played was the earliest version of it; syncopated, often improvised dance tunes heard over and over at parties. With this exposure the "Duke," as he was self-named, was ready authentic when jazz did arrive.

What makes all of this interesting is not just his willfulness but the socially prominent and proper families he came from. There could not have been better models of Victorian decorum than these. Jazz was not in their experience or expectations for him. Yet, the confidence his family showed in him, and the freedom that came from this, allowed Ellington to determine his own pace and style of education and the direction it took. Never an embarrassment to his family and himself, that was proof to them that he was doing all right and would continue to do so. We see other evidence of the self-confidence he gained from this. When in his early twenties he was asked why he didn't try for Julliard and study formal composition and theory as several others his own age were doing, his answer tells us that he knew exactly what he wanted to protect. "Edmund, if I were to do that I think I'd lose everything else that I have. I would ruin everything" (Collier, 1987). Knowing what this "everything" was and how well it worked for him, throughout his life Ellington put far more faith in what was "natural" to him than in the formal aspects of music. This belief was so ingrained that it showed in his manner of composition and his style of managing his bands. Knowing (and reveling in it) that he had been primarily self-taught, he believed that anyone with real talent would also know how do their own "thing" if given minimal guidance and then left alone.

This approach certainly paid off with his bands. He would always hire the best musicians available and give them freedom and scope. So much so that this has created something of a problem for musicologists. Because a number of compositions accredited to solely Ellington (243 of his 1012 according to Rattenbury, 1990) came through direct collaboration with his players, or were inspired by their solos, or were worked out with other composers, it has been at times difficult to know where the most credit belonged. Nevertheless, this style of writing did not create any animosity between Ellington and the others. Because with his manner of composition came his sense of style and generosity in giving public credit to his collaborators. Ellington was always open to his own and others' experience for inspiration. It was one of the deepest sources of his musical longevity. Ellington remained musically alive and composing up to the week he died according to his son Mercer (Ellington & Dance, 1978).

Ellington's Significances
His significance can be put simply: he changed jazz, and through it modern music and America. Along with his popular compositions Ellington always wrote serious jazz, often and successfully. His innovations enriched it as they extended its possibilities. According to Who's Who in America (1972), he opened the way for the Bass (fiddle) to solo, now a standard format in modem jazz; he used sections of the orchestra as tightly arranged soloists; he pioneered "the wordless use of voice as a musical instrument;" he wrote a number of jazz concerti for a soloist ("Concerto for Cootie"--Cootie Williams was his most gifted trumpet player in the thirties) as well as suites, church music, and extended orchestrations ("Black and Tan Fantasy"). None of this had been done before Ellington, but all of it has been incorporated into jazz and modern music.

The other area in which he influenced America through his music was more subtle but as important. Until his death the Ellington orchestra was the longest continuous playing jazz band ever. Because it was the longest continuous active jazz band and so many great jazz musicians of the 1930's through the 1960's passed through Ellington's orchestra it became a major feeder of talent and standards into mainstream jazz. Moreover, because of this durability Ellington kept jazz alive during the worst of economic and racial times. For years there were only two Black musicians that had continuous access to white America, Louis Armstrong and Ellington. Other greats were playing in small clubs, backrooms, and Black enclaves such as Rush Street in Chicago and Harlem in New York. While this did not stop the music from developing, it deeply inhibited the one public cultural area in which White and Black had begun to meet and could meet. What this comes down to is that mainly through the efforts and talents of Ellington and Armstrong, that a cultural bridge was erected and kept open between Black and White America. Almost entirely one-way until the early 1940's, eventually White and Black jazz musicians would commonly share the band stand and concert hail.

Ellington's Band The Source and Bridge of So Much that Is Good in American Music
When mainstream America did discover and respond to large swing bands in the mid-thirties, Ellington's band had already been playing a decade. What was discovered at that time was not jazz so much as it was White swing bands such as Goodman's, Shaw's, or the Dorsey brothers (Simon, 1967). What makes Ellington's in the fulcrum in the swing band era is that, although others quickly came and went, his band was always there, being the most versatile and with discipline. Better than anyone else, with the possible exceptions of Flectcher Henderson and Benny Goodman, Ellington knew precisely the sound he wanted (Collier, 1989). Unlike the rest of big band leaders, Ellington composed this sound himself. It was always different, and it could always be identified as Ellington's. For example whereas other swing bands of the time were close playing ensembles, in which sections played off another, with a short solo or break at times, Ellington was the first and remained the best at giving wide uncharted spaces for his soloists. It is impossible to exaggerate this approach; because of it, the individual musicians could extensively improvise in their solos. This kept the heart of jazz--improvisation--embedded in Ellington's music. Once again we see Ellington's self-confidence at work. Instead of being overly concerned with what is current and popular (commercial), Ellington used his band as his own instrument (not the piano) to compose music and this kept swing far from the "madding crowd." As one writer put it: "Freedom of expression, Duke's and that of his men," permeated his music. This openness to others and his own ideas gave the band a fluid, often changing, impromptu swinging sound. Ellington's band could drive and swing with the best of them at any point in his career. If anyone had solved the problem of keeping the essence of jazz in a big band it was Ellington. This allowed him to keep his best personnel, many of whom were among the greats, and to be the bridge from the basic jazz of the twenties to the more complex orchestrations and compositions to come in the fifties and sixties through such men as Mingus, Monk, Gil Evens, and Miles Davis. This is the reason, and not as a pianist why Ellington ranks with three of the greatest jazz instrumental innovators: Tatum, Armstrong, and Charlie Parker. Like each of them Ellington played his own instrument as no one ever should, in a style all his own.

Obviously these three questions have serious methodological as well as conceptual issues of their own. But there is a fourth question that oven-ides them all. The broadest, and for the present, the most speculative of all is: If there are these recurrent experiences and family parameters in the development of creativity and the achievement of eminence, why? What underlies them? What is their ultimate significance? The answer I feel that best fits this configuration of parameters points to the combination of developmental contextualization (Lerner, 1990) and evolutionary processes--a model that has been steadily emerging in psychology over the past decade (Buss, 1991).

Methodology
Because of the purpose and nature of this study there is not a lot that can be said as to hard-science methodology. We have here what is basically an archival investigation into the lives of eminent persons. As such its validity is primarily dependent upon the sources used and much less the researcher's ability to interpret them. The main sources of data are biographies of well-known persons who lived in different eras in Western culture. Along with this, they do share several other characteristics; the majority of subjects are males, eminent in literature or music with a few being prominent in other fields such as politics and chess. The narrowness of the fields sampled is deliberate, the decision being based on my longitudinal work with two samples of exceptionally gifted boys and their families (Albert, in press), as well as an in depth examination of the life of T. S. Eliot (Albert, 1992). On the basis of this earlier work I believed that there were enough substantial developmental differences between science-oriented boys and equally bright non-science oriented boys that held up in the histories of mature scientists and non-scientists to require separate studies of these two groups. Because the purpose of the present project is to examine in detail whether or not there are common early family parameters operating in the families of eminent men and women it seemed wise to not confuse their histories with others' who are likely to have some different early family parameters and experiences in their development.

With these considerations in mind, the original criteria for selecting subjects were that they be males, eminent in literature or music, born in the same decade, raised in a Western culture, and be the subject of several detailed and well-received biographies.

Once well into this plan I changed directions for reasons already given. But the same basic considerations held as they are related to biographical studies. The literature on biographies and their place in psychological research is substantial and well worth examining for those who are considering using them in research (Anthony, 1989; Edel, 1984; Erikson, 1975; Holt, 1990; Runyan, 1982). Its immediate bearing on this research is a warning that it is mandatory that one refer constantly to at least two or more biographies and reference books on the same person; that they have been written some time apart also can help in guaranteeing they may be written from different points of view (e.g., Psychoanalysis and a less interpretive orientation). It is helpful that one also use the best sources of factual material on the life and career of the subject, such as the National Dictionary of Biography, Who's Who, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and comprehensive reference books in the subject's area of achievement. Here is where Living available a first-rate library and within it reference librarians to act as guides IXIYS unexpected dividends. (As evidence for this, it was after a new biography of Chaucer--Pearsall's (1992)--was placed on public exhibition in the Huntington Library that I felt there might he sufficient information on him to go as far back into time as I did.) Using these references prevents any one hook from becoming an uncontested source of information. One might not expect it but in spite of the generally high level of scholarship behind biographies and standard references, basic "facts" are at times matters of disputes. Oddly enough, some of the most interesting family similarities among the subjects I noticed along the way (e.g., the death of an infant sibling prior to the birth of the subject) were at best simply mentioned and left at that--the details in doubt and unanalyzed. I don't mention this as criticism because biographers do not think as I do, but to alert the reader that one cannot assume that the best of biographers and experts will agree among themselves much less share one's interests. They don't. This is why detailed comparisons are necessities. While they may not indicate the degree of validity of one's interpretations they do offer some closure on the question of the reliability of the information available. A second reason for resorting to more than one biographical source has to do with the "style" it is written in. Some are dramatic reconstructions of conversations long past (e.g., Ackroyd's biography of Charles Dickens). This can make for a wonderful story, but it is one that leaves doubts in its wake. There is a related reason for using more than one source of biographical information. It is an acknowledged fact that each biographer has his or her own point of view and developmental model in mind as a comparison of Ackroyd's (1984) and Gordon's (1977, 1988) biographies of T. S. Eliot demonstrate. This is not an argument for dismissing biographies; to do so is to risk losing a first-rate education from master teachers such as Bate (1977), Edel (1984), and Ellman (1959, 1986). Technical information is also needed to understand the subject arid this is where a wider range of references come into the picture; not as supporting cast to biographies but as equals. Without their wider knowledge it can be difficult to appreciate the range and basis of significance in a subject's efforts and achievements.

So much for sources and resources. There remains one important question that needs acknowledgment and this has to do with the validity of the findings reported. Any study is always subject to questions of validity, but a one-person study is unquestionably restricted in its claims of validity and generality. Frankly, this doesn't bother rue at the moment simply because I did not start with nor have had any illusions that the results of this project are more than a start that I hope will encourage others to continue. The present study is admittedly one person's view of "how things" work, and its results, tentative as they are, are meant to point up aspects of a model of achievement that has been growing for the past twenty years. For the present, some parts of it are better documented than others. There is no reason to hide this because this is the way that science goes. Even though I cannot claim a rock bound certainty about these results, I can attest to an immense pleasure in ferreting them out.

Edward Kennedy Ellington (1899-1974): The Duke
Like Chaucer's and Chatterton's histories, Ellington's is also something of a test for us, Whereas the two previous were in literature and were White, Ellington is African American and in jazz music. Some would say popular music, therefore this doesn't count. But it does count, because this particular music is, a long with baseball and motion pictures, one of the few cultural inventions that is clearly American in origin and not derived from some other culture (Hobson, 1939). Moreover, Ellington, the Duke, is one of the few men we can point to and say that although he was not at jazz's birth, he was a major influence in it staying alive and becoming an integral part of America's culture and everyday life.

In his collection of portraits in jazz, American Musicians, Whitney Balliett (1986) quotes Harold Rosenberg's observations about the great American primitive artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "All works of folk art exist simultaneously in the peaceable kingdom of individual imagination and skill." For Balliett this holds true for "the most startling and original members of this primitive art (jazz), which includes Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Erroll Garner" (p. 266).

It is fruitless to argue over who is the most influential innovator in this history, but by most accounts Ellington is one of the two or three names most often mentioned in jazz history. He is mentioned more often than any one else by other famous jazz musicians in any type of book on jazz (e.g. Eustice & Rubin's (1992) Jazz Spoken Here Carr, Fairweather, & Priestley's (1987) encyclopedic book of 1600 biographies of jazz participants from the earliest days until its publication). In this book, Ellington's is the longest entry. A second empirical index of Ellington's importance to jazz is the number of compositions copyrighted in his name. The first was in 1923 when he was 24 years old and the last was in 1973 just before he died for a total of 1012, of which he is the sole listed composer of 769 (Rattenbury, 1990). These compositions are not little tunes but included many of our standards such as "Mood Indigo," "Take the A Train," and "Sophisticated Lady," to say nothing of his so-called serious pieces and film soundtracks. Once into this particular study I found that relatively few jazz greats are subjects to serious biographies. This tells us that the history of jazz, which is so linked with individual performers and small groups that come and go within a year or two has not reached the same degree of scholarly interest as other parts of American culture, (The most sustained scholarly, "serious" interest in jazz can be found in France.) This lack of interest, seen also in films (Brownlow, 1986), can be measured against the number of books that constantly come from major publishers centered on a variety sports topics, especially baseball, and to a lesser degree, football. Nor is there any contest between the column of publications for American literature and American music, jazz. Yet this "part" of America is one of its most influential. Heard world wide, it identifies the United States in the same way as its films do. Yet for most of its ninety years, jazz has been on the periphery of mainstream American culture even as it has infused most of it.

One irony to this lack of history is that, rare for any important invention and cultural development, jazz's origins, time, and geographics, can be pinpointed (Peretti, 1992; Southern, 1971). Ellington, one of its major contributors, played an active role for nearly sixty years of its ninety years. So, to know something of his history is to know something about jazz's history. The irony here is because Ellington's own musical development differed widely from other major performers and innovators. As is true of many influential and eminent persons in other fields, "Most jazz musicians...make their greatest impact and create their best works in their early twenties, and many added little to their reputations (past age thirty). Ellington showed no such precocity," being in his early thirties before he began to be a name in jazz (Collier, 1987. p. 4).

Although there are several limitations to tracing Ellington's family history and early experiences, derived from the put-down "value" of jazz and Blacks in American culture and the fact that jazz originally came together and grew into a identifiable art form in late 1880's-early 1900's when Black culture was sealed off from main stream America, the Ellington history that we do have gives us a glimpse of an American success story if ever there is one.

Ancestors
Within two generations this family went from slavery to being literate, broadly educated, and able to move itself from poverty into a more favorable racial and economic environment. What we see in this family's history is the interplay of economics, race, and social status as they determine paths to achievement. And although the route that the Ellingtons took to the United States obviously was a far different one than the Roosevelts', the Eliots', the James', and other eminent Americans (but not for many immigrants in the late 1880's, early 1900's such as Benny Goodman's family), it has many of the same parameters to it that run through those other famous families.

For all of the social and racial differences between the Ellingtons and prominent White families, like many of them, the Ellingtons show the importance of moving to and settling in an urban environment with both its risks and its opportunities. Like other families (e.g. the Brontës, the Eliots), the Ellingtons show us that there is usually one daring person who deliberately makes the critical move out of an impoverished, closed off environment to a richer one.

All of Ellington's great grandparents are believed to have met as slaves, "taken or sold" in Virginia and South Carolina (Collier, 1987; Ellington, 1973). Sometime around 1840, Ellington's paternal grandfather was born and in 1844 his paternal grandmother was born. Immediately after the Civil War, when they would have been in their early 20's, this young couple moved their growing family and settled in a small Black town in North Carolina. It is believed that this time both grandparents were doing either casual labor or domestic work. Nevertheless, it was not long before they were able to buy a farm of their own, To make matters more difficult during the 1870's, while in his thirties, Ellington's grandfather had a series of strokes that left him paralyzed, but with the help of his children he still managed the farm and made sure that they got the best education possible. In fact, one of his brothers became a trained teacher in the local school.

Two things stand out here. Obviously education mattered to the family. Secondly, as in the histories of Chaucer and the Brontes, we see how a family in one generation may move itself to a more favorable environment in which it takes advantage of the resources found there. This is important; its long term significance is that this move sets the stage for the next generation to become better established educationally, economically, and socially. At this point in its history, other Ellington family members were more positioned to take advantage of opportunities. In the 1890's the economic and racial conditions around them in North Carolina worsened, but because of their preparation "a group of Ellington men began to migrate to Washington, D.C." (Collier, 1987, p. 7). Over the next few years others followed and Washington soon became the family hometown.

Special Birth-Order
Before discussing Ellington's family there is one particular characteristic that is important to keep in mind because it helps explain the deep impact of his ancestors and his mother and father on him. It is this: Ellington, like a surprising number of eminent persons, was preceded by an unnamed brother who had died in infancy, during 1898, only one year before Duke's own birth, making him an "only surviving son" (Albert, 1980b). Like the Eliots, the Chattertons, and the Weltys, there is no clear family record on this child, and little if anything was said about it to Duke Ellington and his sister Ruby. According to Ellington's biographer Collier (1987), the date "is not certain." Duke Ellington (1973) does not mention this in his autobiography, nor does his son Mercer (Ellington & Dance, 1978) in his book. Be that as it may, this ambiguity leaves a blank in the family emotionally and historically that is nearly identical to the family situation into which T.S. Eliot, Thomas Chatterton, and Eudora Welty were born. What gives this tremendous significance is that although Edward Kennedy (Duke) Ellington believed he was an only child, and says he was raised as an only child through his adolescence, he was not. As far as he was concerned he was a very "special" and only son, hovered over, prized, and "precious," especially to his mother and the other women in his family.

Parents
Among the first group of Ellington men to make the trip to Washington was Ellington's father, James Edward Ellington. In four years, not yet twenty years old, he got the economic opportunity of his life, and was prepared for it. He was able to work for a highly respected society doctor. Soon after starting this job James Edward met Daisy Kennedy, whose father (Ellington's maternal grandfather) was then a captain in the Washington police and already had strong political connections and a upper-middle status in the community. Ellington's maternal grandfather, James William Kennedy, was the equal of his paternal grandfather in several ways. The Ellington family legend says that he too was born a slave in Virginia. When his master freed him, (as slave owners sometimes did in cases of their half-caste sons) he moved directly to Washington, settled, and returned to Virginia for his wife. Together they both settled in Washington where they had between nine and twelve children.

Duke's father, James Edward Ellington, remained with the doctor for twenty years, after which he went to work at the Navy Yard during World War I. For some people the match between Ellington's mother and father was something of a surprise. She came from a socially advantaged family, was light skinned, beautiful, and the daughter of one of Washington's leading men. Ellington's son, Mercer (Ellington & Dance, 1978) tells us that this marriage showed strains over the years. Be that as it may, it was a "solid" one where it concerned Duke.

The family in which Duke was born was one with strong religious habits and "Victorian moral views." But equally important was the mother-child relationships established in it. The best way to give the reader a sense of the relationships is to quote Ellington himself:

Because of the fact that no one else but my sister Ruth had a mother as great and as beautiful as mine, it is difficult to put into understandable words an accurate description of my mother, Daisy...I was pampered and pampered, and spoiled rotten by all the women in the family, aunts, and cousins, but my mother never took her eyes off precious little me, her jewel, until I was four years old (when Ellington fell, cut his finger and his mother called two doctors. Ellington tells us that she stayed bedside day and night until she was sure his fever was down). (Ellington, 1973, p. 6)

When he describes his father, Ellington is less florid, but equally direct. He leaves no doubt what he saw. His mother was "beautiful" while his father "was only handsome."

"While my mother had graduated from high school, I don't think my father even finished eighth grade. Yet his vocabulary was what I always hoped mine to be. In fact, I have always wanted to be able to be and talk like my pappy" (Ellington, 1973, p. 12).

It is interesting what Ellington highlights about his parents: mother's beauty, adoration of him and devotion; father's vocabulary. Later in his book Ellington tells us that his father was also a "great" ballroom dancer, a wit, and a man who always found the right words and way to speak to woman. We are told by others that Ellington learned these skills very well and practiced them throughout his life (Collier, 1987; Ellington & Dance, 1978).

There is one important characteristic about him and his family that differs from most other jazz greats. In looking into the prevalence of "talent-rich" families among jazz musicians, (that is, evidence that other members of their family also had a talent, usually in the same domain) I find that close to 70% of them come from such families (see also Buerkle & Barker, 1973). But equally striking is that unlike Ellington and many eminent persons in other fields, jazz musicians are not more likely to be the oldest/only son than in any other birth-order. Nor are they likely to be the child of a socially or economically well-placed person. Because so many of these men (Black and White) are from relatively poor or lower middle-class families one finds among them a process of talent identification and work (not "career") choice similar to that of emigrant families struggling in the first third of this century when jazz began to develop. The loudest family encouragement and whatever possible resources it had went to the most "talented" of a family's children regardless of where he (almost always "he") came in the family order.

There is no better example of this than the life of Benny Goodman (Collier, 1989). He was the middle child of 12 children, but quite early, he was identified as being far more musically talented than the other children, including the neighbors' children as well. It was barely six-year-old Benny for whom his father searched for and managed to find free music lessons at the nearby Synagogue. Granted there was paternal pride in this but it was primarily because the father knew that during those depressed years, musicians made more money than he the father could, or ever did. Three older Goodman brothers also went into music later and with far less talent and success than Benny. In poor(er) families, it is talent and the ability to work that catches the family's attention. Interestingly, this process is also found during the earliest years of motion pictures and professional sports. And out of it, jazz, together these two other occupations rapidly made up the bulk of the nations entertainment industry long before the advent of radio and certainly before television, indicating that the sequences of talent identification and education and career choice are often different within poor and/or socially marginal families from those within middle-class and upper families. Ellington's family was not only upper-middle class in terms of Black-American society but on the basis of this, perceived him and expected from him a career far different from that of most jazz musicians, white or Black, at that time. If one wants a comparison, it is that many of his family experiences are closer to T. S. Eliot's than to Benny Goodman's.

Ellington's Education
From all evidence, Ellington's musical talent came from both sides of his family (Collier, 1989; Ellington, 1973). Both parents were talented, each in his and her own way. His mother played the piano ("pretty things...so pretty they'd make me cry"). His father also played piano but by ear and "all operatic stuff" (Ellington p. 20). Without reaching too far for a correlate to Ellington's later music, these are two stylistic characteristics that can be found in some of his later compositions. But in tracking his education, it came initially from his mother but mainly we have to acknowledge that it came primarily from himself. In spite of his early childhood falls and illnesses no one can deny that Ellington's boyhood was exceptional only in how comfortable and uneventful it was. It is one that is the complete opposite to Chatterton's. Raised in the midst of a stable, economically well-to-do family as well as being the center of attention in it and a large successful, close extended family, one can argue that Ellington started life with the best of psychological foundations.

For example, one of the most important lessons Ellington ever learned came early and from his mother. He was blessed.

Do I believe that I am blessed? Of course, I do! In the first place, my mother told me so, many, many times, and when she said it, it was always quietly, confidently. She was very soft -spoken, and I knew that anything she told me was true.... Until this day I really don't have any fears...There have been so many extraordinary and inexplicable circumstances in my life. I have always seemed to encounter the right people in the right places at the right times, and doing the right thing to give me the kind of instruction and guidance I needed. (Ellington, 1973, p. 15)

If this sounds like an echo from Freud's remarks about his mother and parts of Eliot's early years, it is. All three men were much loved and protected by their mothers early in their lives; if there is a risk in this love it is that they might have been co-opted and smothered by it. But none were and each chose a path for himself. With this sense of supreme confidence and support the other parts of Ellington's education were by choice primarily technical trimmings and basic piano skills.

What there was of it, because of his mother, Ellington's formal schooling started a year earlier than normal. She had put his age up from five to six to enroll him into the first grade. This went well enough; at the same time his mother thought Ellington should take formal piano lesson with a Mrs. Clinkscales (sic). Again things went well--for a time. But within the year it was evident that this was not a time when music or any formal instruction would be easy for Ellington. That he was bright is not a question; the problem was in his personality. As early as age six and throughout his life he was very resistant to arid scornful of formal teaching. According to persons who knew him well, Ellington did not take to strict self-discipline or the role of being the student to another person. For example, his first formal musical lessons were over almost as soon as they began, lasting no more than several months. His mother realized that he wasn't ready (or willing) to concentrate on them and withdrew him. (But did she see how resistant to them he was?) Later Ellington showed that they had not been wasted, but already we see a common theme found in almost every educational step and later career decision he took. He had to do it himself, without others' explicit or formal involvement. This is true of his choice of instrument when he become serious about music in the seventh grade. It was Ellington who selected the piano. As far as learning to play it, he also selected his teachers. When he was around age 14, Ellington heard Harvey Brooks, a pianist with a jazz reputation. It inspired him that Brooks only several years older, which may have made his identification easier (and probably a bit competitive) for Ellington.

Here is where illness also played a role in his development. Confined to his home for "a couple weeks" he used the time to "fiddle around" on the piano. This episode is typical of Ellington in another way. He was also extremely resistant to working on the intricacies of piano techniques. But freed during this confinement (age 14) he wrote his first song "Soda Fountain Rag," which was followed soon by "What You Gonna Do When The Bed Breaks Down?" With these two songs done, Ellington felt confident to go out and play parties.

Other mentors now came into Ellington's life. Between ages 15-17 Ellington sought out and listened to a series of older players in Washington. Being as socially polished and polite as he was, these men were willing to help. The first was Doc Oliver Perry who "taught" him chords; next was Henry Grant who was even more prominent than Perry in Washington music circles. He taught Ellington harmony. Not only were these men knowledgeable but just as important they knew how to handle Ellington; they were casual and informal in their instruction, taking the lead from Ellington about what he wanted while still making him aware of the technicalities he would need. Unlike in the early formal lessons, Ellington could learn in this setting. Best yet, there was a social incentive to Ellington's learning style. When he was sixteen, he was good enough to sit in for other pianists and within a year he was definitely a part of Washington's Black society, partly because of his family's connection and partly because of his own talents, socially and musically. It is clear to him and others that by this time he had found how he best learned and functioned. Although it is not pure jazz that he was learning (he could not have heard it until 1917 when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's records reached him), the music he knew then and played was the earliest version of it; syncopated, often improvised dance tunes heard over and over at parties. With this exposure the "Duke," as he was self-named, was ready authentic when jazz did arrive.

What makes all of this interesting is not just his willfulness but the socially prominent and proper families he came from. There could not have been better models of Victorian decorum than these. Jazz was not in their experience or expectations for him. Yet, the confidence his family showed in him, and the freedom that came from this, allowed Ellington to determine his own pace and style of education and the direction it took. Never an embarrassment to his family and himself, that was proof to them that he was doing all right and would continue to do so. We see other evidence of the self-confidence he gained from this. When in his early twenties he was asked why he didn't try for Julliard and study formal composition and theory as several others his own age were doing, his answer tells us that he knew exactly what he wanted to protect. "Edmund, if I were to do that I think I'd lose everything else that I have. I would ruin everything" (Collier, 1987). Knowing what this "everything" was and how well it worked for him, throughout his life Ellington put far more faith in what was "natural" to him than in the formal aspects of music. This belief was so ingrained that it showed in his manner of composition and his style of managing his bands. Knowing (and reveling in it) that he had been primarily self-taught, he believed that anyone with real talent would also know how do their own "thing" if given minimal guidance and then left alone.

This approach certainly paid off with his bands. He would always hire the best musicians available and give them freedom and scope. So much so that this has created something of a problem for musicologists. Because a number of compositions accredited to solely Ellington (243 of his 1012 according to Rattenbury, 1990) came through direct collaboration with his players, or were inspired by their solos, or were worked out with other composers, it has been at times difficult to know where the most credit belonged. Nevertheless, this style of writing did not create any animosity between Ellington and the others. Because with his manner of composition came his sense of style and generosity in giving public credit to his collaborators. Ellington was always open to his own and others' experience for inspiration. It was one of the deepest sources of his musical longevity. Ellington remained musically alive and composing up to the week he died according to his son Mercer (Ellington & Dance, 1978).

Ellington's Significances
His significance can be put simply: he changed jazz, and through it modern music and America. Along with his popular compositions Ellington always wrote serious jazz, often and successfully. His innovations enriched it as they extended its possibilities. According to Who's Who in America (1972), he opened the way for the Bass (fiddle) to solo, now a standard format in modem jazz; he used sections of the orchestra as tightly arranged soloists; he pioneered "the wordless use of voice as a musical instrument;" he wrote a number of jazz concerti for a soloist ("Concerto for Cootie"--Cootie Williams was his most gifted trumpet player in the thirties) as well as suites, church music, and extended orchestrations ("Black and Tan Fantasy"). None of this had been done before Ellington, but all of it has been incorporated into jazz and modern music.

The other area in which he influenced America through his music was more subtle but as important. Until his death the Ellington orchestra was the longest continuous playing jazz band ever. Because it was the longest continuous active jazz band and so many great jazz musicians of the 1930's through the 1960's passed through Ellington's orchestra it became a major feeder of talent and standards into mainstream jazz. Moreover, because of this durability Ellington kept jazz alive during the worst of economic and racial times. For years there were only two Black musicians that had continuous access to white America, Louis Armstrong and Ellington. Other greats were playing in small clubs, backrooms, and Black enclaves such as Rush Street in Chicago and Harlem in New York. While this did not stop the music from developing, it deeply inhibited the one public cultural area in which White and Black had begun to meet and could meet. What this comes down to is that mainly through the efforts and talents of Ellington and Armstrong, that a cultural bridge was erected and kept open between Black and White America. Almost entirely one-way until the early 1940's, eventually White and Black jazz musicians would commonly share the band stand and concert hail.

Ellington's Band The Source and Bridge of So Much that Is Good in American Music
When mainstream America did discover and respond to large swing bands in the mid-thirties, Ellington's band had already been playing a decade. What was discovered at that time was not jazz so much as it was White swing bands such as Goodman's, Shaw's, or the Dorsey brothers (Simon, 1967). What makes Ellington's in the fulcrum in the swing band era is that, although others quickly came and went, his band was always there, being the most versatile and with discipline. Better than anyone else, with the possible exceptions of Flectcher Henderson and Benny Goodman, Ellington knew precisely the sound he wanted (Collier, 1989). Unlike the rest of big band leaders, Ellington composed this sound himself. It was always different, and it could always be identified as Ellington's. For example whereas other swing bands of the time were close playing ensembles, in which sections played off another, with a short solo or break at times, Ellington was the first and remained the best at giving wide uncharted spaces for his soloists. It is impossible to exaggerate this approach; because of it, the individual musicians could extensively improvise in their solos. This kept the heart of jazz--improvisation--embedded in Ellington's music. Once again we see Ellington's self-confidence at work. Instead of being overly concerned with what is current and popular (commercial), Ellington used his band as his own instrument (not the piano) to compose music and this kept swing far from the "madding crowd." As one writer put it: "Freedom of expression, Duke's and that of his men," permeated his music. This openness to others and his own ideas gave the band a fluid, often changing, impromptu swinging sound. Ellington's band could drive and swing with the best of them at any point in his career. If anyone had solved the problem of keeping the essence of jazz in a big band it was Ellington. This allowed him to keep his best personnel, many of whom were among the greats, and to be the bridge from the basic jazz of the twenties to the more complex orchestrations and compositions to come in the fifties and sixties through such men as Mingus, Monk, Gil Evens, and Miles Davis. This is the reason, and not as a pianist why Ellington ranks with three of the greatest jazz instrumental innovators: Tatum, Armstrong, and Charlie Parker. Like each of them Ellington played his own instrument as no one ever should, in a style all his own.

Obviously these three questions have serious methodological as well as conceptual issues of their own. But there is a fourth question that oven-ides them all. The broadest, and for the present, the most speculative of all is: If there are these recurrent experiences and family parameters in the development of creativity and the achievement of eminence, why? What underlies them? What is their ultimate significance? The answer I feel that best fits this configuration of parameters points to the combination of developmental contextualization (Lerner, 1990) and evolutionary processes--a model that has been steadily emerging in psychology over the past decade (Buss, 1991).

Methodology
Because of the purpose and nature of this study there is not a lot that can be said as to hard-science methodology. We have here what is basically an archival investigation into the lives of eminent persons. As such its validity is primarily dependent upon the sources used and much less the researcher's ability to interpret them. The main sources of data are biographies of well-known persons who lived in different eras in Western culture. Along with this, they do share several other characteristics; the majority of subjects are males, eminent in literature or music with a few being prominent in other fields such as politics and chess. The narrowness of the fields sampled is deliberate, the decision being based on my longitudinal work with two samples of exceptionally gifted boys and their families (Albert, in press), as well as an in depth examination of the life of T. S. Eliot (Albert, 1992). On the basis of this earlier work I believed that there were enough substantial developmental differences between science-oriented boys and equally bright non-science oriented boys that held up in the histories of mature scientists and non-scientists to require separate studies of these two groups. Because the purpose of the present project is to examine in detail whether or not there are common early family parameters operating in the families of eminent men and women it seemed wise to not confuse their histories with others' who are likely to have some different early family parameters and experiences in their development.

With these considerations in mind, the original criteria for selecting subjects were that they be males, eminent in literature or music, born in the same decade, raised in a Western culture, and be the subject of several detailed and well-received biographies.

Once well into this plan I changed directions for reasons already given. But the same basic considerations held as they are related to biographical studies. The literature on biographies and their place in psychological research is substantial and well worth examining for those who are considering using them in research (Anthony, 1989; Edel, 1984; Erikson, 1975; Holt, 1990; Runyan, 1982). Its immediate bearing on this research is a warning that it is mandatory that one refer constantly to at least two or more biographies and reference books on the same person; that they have been written some time apart also can help in guaranteeing they may be written from different points of view (e.g., Psychoanalysis and a less interpretive orientation). It is helpful that one also use the best sources of factual material on the life and career of the subject, such as the National Dictionary of Biography, Who's Who, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and comprehensive reference books in the subject's area of achievement. Here is where Living available a first-rate library and within it reference librarians to act as guides IXIYS unexpected dividends. (As evidence for this, it was after a new biography of Chaucer--Pearsall's (1992)-was placed on public exhibition in the Huntington Library that I felt there might he sufficient information on him to go as far back into time as I did.) Using these references prevents any one hook from becoming an uncontested source of information. One might not expect it but in spite of the generally high level of scholarship behind biographies and standard references, basic "facts" are at times matters of disputes. Oddly enough, some of the most interesting family similarities among the subjects I noticed along the way (e.g., the death of an infant sibling prior to the birth of the subject) were at best simply mentioned and left at that--the details in doubt and unanalyzed. I don't mention this as criticism because biographers do not think as I do, but to alert the reader that one cannot assume that the best of biographers and experts will agree among themselves much less share one's interests. They don't. This is why detailed comparisons are necessities. While they may not indicate the degree of validity of one's interpretations they do offer some closure on the question of the reliability of the information available. A second reason for resorting to more than one biographical source has to do with the "style" it is written in. Some are dramatic reconstructions of conversations long past (e.g., Ackroyd's biography of Charles Dickens). This can make for a wonderful story, but it is one that leaves doubts in its wake. There is a related reason for using more than one source of biographical information. It is an acknowledged fact that each biographer has his or her own point of view and developmental model in mind as a comparison of Ackroyd's (1984) and Gordon's (1977, 1988) biographies of T. S. Eliot demonstrate. This is not an argument for dismissing biographies; to do so is to risk losing a first-rate education from master teachers such as Bate (1977), Edel (1984), and Ellman (1959, 1986). Technical information is also needed to understand the subject arid this is where a wider range of references come into the picture; not as supporting cast to biographies but as equals. Without their wider knowledge it can be difficult to appreciate the range and basis of significance in a subject's efforts and achievements.

So much for sources and resources. There remains one important question that needs acknowledgment and this has to do with the validity of the findings reported. Any study is always subject to questions of validity, but a one-person study is unquestionably restricted in its claims of validity and generality. Frankly, this doesn't bother rue at the moment simply because I did not start with nor have had any illusions that the results of this project are more than a start that I hope will encourage others to continue. The present study is admittedly one person's view of "how things" work, and its results, tentative as they are, are meant to point up aspects of a model of achievement that has been growing for the past twenty years. For the present, some parts of it are better documented than others. There is no reason to hide this because this is the way that science goes. Even though I cannot claim a rock bound certainty about these results, I can attest to an immense pleasure in ferreting them out.

Results and Discussion

Birth Order
There is every reason to start this discussion with the influences of birth-order for several reasons other than the fact that there is a large body of research to draw upon. Along with gender, birth-order is one of a person's two most enduring characteristics. What happens to this person early on is as much a result of their gender and birth order as whether he or she is gifted or talented. More specifically, these two developmental "givens" of each child influence their formal and informal educations from birth on. Although gender and birth-order do not lock in or out forever potential, they do screen in and out many important messages and experiences related to it. Each puts a template over a child's development outside of which it is almost impossible to script one's own identity. And yet this is what must happen to some degree if creativity is to develop from giftedness. When it does take place it develops differently for males and females. For example, there is little doubt that bright, talented girls are put on a different family track and social clock than equally talented boys in terms of the types of encouragements they are given, when, and from whom they are given (Helson, 1985). And if they have an older brother who may not be as gifted or talented, the girl is nonetheless likely to drop down or even out of the family's priorities, as we see in the cases of Galton and Mozart and their talented older sisters. What makes gender and birth-order such powerful parameters is that from birth on they determine the quality as well as the what, when, and why of many families' involvement and expectations, and, influencing this, they cannot help but to determine a large part of a child's learning experiences in and outside of the family. Therefore, operating as they do, gender and birth-order are organizers on several levels of development, and when we look at how they organize a child's development we can not help seeing how, through them, maturation and culture are inter-related from birth on and together determine much of a child's opportunities for achievement.

These are the basics and nothing new to us. But because they do this, they also set the stage for something that is not always discussed and this is why there are substantial cognitive and achievement differences between gifted children who become highly competent, "effective" adults, and those who become highly creative and, at times, eminent. Good evidence has been found over the years that these two groups come from homes that are quite different from one another's in some significant developmental ways (Albert, 1978, 1980h, 1980c; Dacey, 1989; Eiduson, 1962; Keniston, 1965, 1968; MacKinnon, 1962, 1978: Oden, 1983; Roe, 1952). It helps to organize these differences when we say that these differences lie along two dimensions--degree of conventionality and degree of expression of interfamily tension. One can place the families of those children who generally develop into effective adults high along the dimension of conventionality. They achieve primarily in accordance with "conformance" to known social standards (to use the California Psychological Inventory's term). Such families are highly concerned with conventionality, especially in regard to their status, and therefore, we should not be surprised to learn that the parents are consistently more vigilant where the child's behavior in and out of school is concerned. Such families are good at worrying about the child's good grades and the good impressions made by the child and devote a lot of their time and effort in seeing that they happen. As for the emotional life within such families, it is kept under control and expressed mostly either indirectly or in explosive anger. Thus we would find these families placed low on the dimension of emotional expression. Together these two dimensions depict a family's degree of control as it relates to emotionality and behavior. The creative group's family is noticeably less conventional in its own behavior and concern for status. This is accompanied by significantly more emotional openness and expression inside these families. When these are beyond the tolerance of a child they can make for developmental risks of their-own. Even so, two characteristics of these families I think carry great weight in facilitating the transformation of giftedness into creativity. The first is the family's lack of concern about conventionality coupled with its relative indifference and/or inability to achieving a high status of its own. It is not that these families do not acknowledge that status is part of their culture, but that they choose not to give it the high priority, and therefore, influence that others do. As one might imagine, the families that have already achieved a high social status as the Eliots, the Roosevelts, the MacArthurs, and the Ellingtons do not overly concern themselves with status. They have it and build from there. It seems that the families which worry the most about their status and are most inclined to "train" their children for it are those in the low to middle range of social status. They are near but not completely sure of having achieved enough status to feel socially secure. Among such families racial, ethnic, and religious marginality may actually help "free" them and the child from a preoccupation with status. This is often true for artists, writers and entrepreneurs, and a surprising number of scientists (e.g., Eiduson, 1962; Roe, 1952). Among the families that are both low and marginal in their status, regardless of the cognitive abilities present in them, achievements often take (or took earlier in this century) a different route, one in which completed formal education is less a requirement, but early maturing talent is capitalized on (e.g., entertainment and sports especially). Then there are the families which have "wobbles" to them (Albert, 1978). In comparison to other families in its cohort, they are "special," if not deviant in some identifiable way. Their children, often talented in entertainment, appear to be more at risk than the others for serious developmental problems. But in the main, the families of creative persons do not orient as much of their behavior or socialization toward conventional achievements as do the families of primarily conventionally achieving children and effective adults. Early on this difference shows in the greater freedom and less vigilance these families direct toward a child (Dacey, 1989; Getzels & Jackson, 1962).

Now as to the developmental impact of these differences. First, not only is the child within a creativity-oriented family less likely to have an established identity awaiting his or her birth, but there is "room" and a need to invent one's own in this particular family (Greer's Law mentioned earlier). Again, this can be a risk, but in an opposite direction from that in the highly conventionalized family. In such a family one is given an identity based on the part of conventional gender roles and stereotypes. Another result is the lack of straight "A" students among creativity-oriented families, even among the oldest-only children. Time and again (Howe, 1990; MacKinnon, 1965; Simonton, 1984), we have learned that creative children as students are more selective in where they put their efforts. It is a well documented fact that the "only-oldest" males are quite often motivated and trained to earn good grades, but what is not usually noticed is that "effective" adults are generally "only-oldest" who have been high achievers in their academics and career choices. Such results demonstrate the power families have when their basic orientation and socialization converge. It is then that we notice that there is no randomness within families' intentions or child-rearing priorities. What has always struck me the most as I have sorted through the lives of eminent persons is this lack of randomness. Although there is some variation in the combinations of variables that appear, this is remarkably slight among eminent persons because we see many of the same variables appearing in combination with one another (e.g., older than usual parents, parents who have a significant age difference between them, talented parent(s) and a child also talented in the same domain, a child having a "special" birth-order and being the favorite child of one parent). It is rare that these variables (and their combination) are not incorporated into a powerful set of on-going every day parent-child interactions within the family. The key word is "on-going," for rarely is something (from memories to money) that is important to a family left off to the side or buried so deeply it is not involved in the behaviors of one or more members. As we see time and again, there are few, if any, "throw-aways" in families.

The second family parameter is that the majority of families are goal-directed. One goal that is shared by all of them is their survival as a living, self-sustaining group. However, it is on "how" to achieve this goal that families distinguish themselves. And here is where socioeconomic status and ethnicity function as guidelines and determine much of a family's opportunities for surviving.

Once again, birth-order is an extremely powerful early organizer and, as such, it is a major determinant in what family interests, expectations, and resources are focused on a child, by whom, and why.

During this and earlier research I have come to think that the concept of "birth-order" alone does not cover the whole story of family position. We have to acknowledge that in Western cultures there are some developmental characteristics that cluster more to one than to other birth-orders. For a long time I thought that the word "special" could discriminate among birth-orders. But I am now more than ever impressed with how much of a child's particular birth-order is not merely an "accident" of timing and conventional expectations, but is also determined by powerful unpredictable events happening in and to its family. Since doing this piece of research I have concluded that there is a better way to distinguish among the birth-orders of children than by designating them either as "special" or non-special. Looking closely, the child who was in the "special" birth-order is most often the "only-oldest." We know the developmental outcomes generally associated with these positions. But the term "special" does not distinguish between those children who are "specials" by birth and those which are "special," less through birth and more because of some earlier family experience.

For purposes of clarity, I propose to designate those children in the "only-oldest," or "very youngest" family positions, a "favored" child. This matches up with the type of family treatment they often receive according to the literature. And I suggest that the label "special" be restricted to those children who are exceptional in ways other than birth-order. These would be children who have been preceded by an unexpected historical event such as the death of the father prior to, or right after, the child's birth (e.g., Chatterton), a preceding sibling's death in infancy or early childhood, (e.g., all of the subjects discussed in this paper), or the mother's death during the child's birth, or soon after (e.g., the Brontës.) These are both rare and "special" events with profound repercussions in and for the whole family. As one can see, many children are "favored" by their birth-order, but very few are or become "special" to their families through no effort or intrinsic characteristic of their own other than "being there" when the unpredictable historical event occurs. Therefore, in this sense, being a "special" child is an attributed role while being a "favored" one is ascribed and bestowed by birth.

"Special" Children: Chaucer, Chatterton, Ellington, and MacArthur
Going through their histories we find that all of these men, eminent regardless of when they lived, held "special" family positions; in addition they were also "favored" sons. Chaucer, an only son and surviving child; Chatterton even more "special" as a posthumous son who was preceded by two deaths-his father and an infant brother; and Ellington, an only son and older child, who was preceded by the death of a brother.

I have earlier discussed in some detail the "special" family positions of T. S. Eliot and Eudora Welty (Albert, 1992) and in this paper that of Chaucer, Chatterton, and Ellington. I will now present a synopsis of General Douglas MacArthur's development because it illustrates both the fact that "specialness" occurs in more than the arts, and how it soon involves a family's history, its relationships, and socializing behaviors. What is clear in this life is how salient a "special" position can make a family's earlier history in the development of a child, especially in regard to its long held aspirations and achievements, and how these fast become concrete, immediate, and omnipresent in the child's life because of his parents' own identification and involvement with these aspirations and with the "special" child.

Few persons fit the family position of "special" child better than Douglas MacArthur. He was the third and last child of Capt. Arthur MacArthur, a bone fide Civil War hero who had won the Medal of Honor for winning a battle by going on the attack without orders. This was a feat that had a central place in the family's lore, and years later, his son Douglas would not rest until he, too, had won the Medal of Honor. He did, but not without some doubters as to his merit. Some persons believed it came more for political than for heroic reasons, when, according to them, he left--some say fled--the Philippines under orders early in World War II.

As for his family position, Douglas had two older brothers who met "early" deaths. The older one, Arthur III, died suddenly of an appendicitis in 1923. Douglas was 43 years old. It is his next older brother's, Malcolm, only 15 months older than Douglas, who died at age 4.5 years in 1883, when Douglas was three years old that adds the "specialness" to Douglas in the family. Some years later MacArthur recalled that for his mother, whom he idealized and remained extremely close to all his life, this boy's death was "a terrible blow" to her, sad and no doubt true, but what interests me is a consequence of this death:

"it seemed to only increase her devotion to Arthur and myself. This tie was to become one of the dominant factors in my life" (MacArthur, 1964, p. 60).

This is true. We learn from several sources (James, 1970; Manchester, 1978) that his mother never left his side, traveling wherever he went, or was sent by the Army. While Douglas was a cadet at West Point, his mother lived just off the campus, in Craney's Hotel where from her window she could see if his study light was on. And at the end of the day she often strolled down Flirtation Walk [sic] with him, all the while keeping a protective eye out for young women he might become interested in. Obviously results came from this vigilance because Douglas graduated with a four-year average of 98.14, a GPA topped only by Robert E. Lee, and one other cadet. Nor was his mother's close scrutiny and pressure lost on Douglas. He recalled in his later memoirs that throughout the years his mother had constantly told him that he had two obligations--one was to excel and the other was to her. The pressures, this set of obligations brought evidently were felt by the famous "special" son. When he became a father he once told an aide, "My mother put too much pressure on me. Being number one is the loneliest job in the world, and I wouldn't wish it on any son of mine" (MacArthur, p. 60). This seems to be clear enough.

But in order to appreciate how it can be a directive and motivation to achieve in other lines, let me point to several similarities between MacArthur and two other famous men, Winston Churchill and Sigmund Freud. Very much like Churchill, when MacArthur's father died in 1912 (Douglas was 32 years old), according to those who knew both men well, like Churchill, he too took on a number of his father's characteristics and general haughty demeanor; moreover, on a deep psychological level, he also acquired his father's often-voiced fear that less gifted men were plotting against him because of their envy of him and his achievements. Another less obvious similarity among these men is that although they excelled in different careers they shared abiding interests in the politics of their professions and were exceptionally political in their pursuits of success and relationships.

After his father died, Douglas said, "My whole world changed... Never have I been able to heal the wound in my heart" (MacArthur, p. 62). Be that as it may, like Freud, MacArthur was without question the center of his mother's attention and affections. And like Churchill, but unlike Freud (at least as we are told by Freud himself), MacArthur's father was clearly a hero in the public eye and for his son. What is common to all three of these famous sons is the intense emotional balance that existed between them and their parents. Binding and ambivalent, each of these sons showed barely disguised lifelong competition with their fathers and an almost complete passive acceptance of their mother's lavished affections and protection. All of which raises the question, is this as Freud once suggested, the "golden" relationship that often leads to a son's supreme self-confidence later in life? And if so, is it for boys only?

Intergenerational and Transgenerational Family Transfer Processes
Among the many dimensions that make up a family, there is one that, with a few exceptions (e.g., Voss, 1991), does not receive the attention it deserves. This is the historical dimension which is a mix of real-time events, memories and reconstructions so important in linking present and past members. One of its most powerful influences in a family is the establishment and maintenance of continuity over time, among many contexts and persons, and through an infinite number of experiences. Among the benefits from this history can be individuals' own sense of meaningful relationships and membership with other persons identified as "family." Just as important is an awareness that this specific "family" has survived much life and may continue to do so.

This double sense of family history and continuity is not an abstraction, but can become a vital part of the personalities of its members as Erikson (1963) and Stern (1985) have argued. On an every day concrete level it is expressed in the set of values, choices, and skills regularly favored by members exhibited as family presses (Albert & Runco, 1986, 1987, 1989), recurrent family themes and expectations (Hess & Handel, 1959), and preferences and personality styles (Conley, 1985).

Having said this, we are faced with the question of how these are transmitted among members and over generations. At the risk of oversimplification, I think of these exchanges as transfers of information and they are required because no family is de novo and unprecedented. The question therefore is not whether the processes exist, but how active in a particular family they will be. Because I want to focus on their historical function, I distinguish between them as Intergenerational and Transgenerational family transfer pronouns.

From what I have learned of these families, for any family to have a good chance of survival, its possibilities increase as the number of generations involved increase. It is not clear empirically at what number rigidity and irrelevant information take over. But assets are strong possibilities for a family with at least three generations actively involved in it. Under this condition, there is a great deal of skill, experience, and knowledge available. One-generation or single-parent families generally do not have the survival skills required, such as education, basic information, or a grounding in the community to offset adversities. If nothing more, one-parent families or even some two-parent families fighting poverty are often handicapped, isolated families at great disadvantages. That they can and do survive and establish themselves is an achievement for them equal to any other family's (e.g., Clark, 1983). But what so many of us take for granted--a sense of a future--is not always within their reach. And 'as we have seen in a number of eminence facilitating families, a sense of a future, personal hope, and sophisticated problem-solving skills are basic resources available in them and are usually learned from one's parents. Even if the family's relationships are fraught and fragile, at least skills are being passed on and not invented. Also, as these lives have demonstrated, early experiences within an intact family are often an excellent dry run for the young, and testing ground for their own futures. All of this make good reasons for what I refer to as the Three Generation Hypothesis.

The Three Generation Hypothesis
Why is it so often the case that I find persons in the two preceding generations, usually a grandfather and either the mother or the father, are so important in the third generation child's attainment of eminence? Moreover, their importance takes a fairly standard form in cases of success or low performances (Mien, 1979; Keniston, 1965, 1968).

From what I have seen, there are two broad areas in which the preceding generations' most direct contributions lie. One is in the area of "domain" preference, in which not only does a child's giftedness/talent occur, but also its strong interest. The other area of contribution is in the accumulation of educational, social, and financial resources, which is often but not always identical to having a high socioeconomic status. Paradoxically, when we go back in time we usually see that one of the benefits passed on by a preceding generation is a startling change in the family's status and social environment in which important intellectual resources and education become accessible to the family. We have seen this occur in Ellington's, Chaucer's, and, to a lesser degree, Chatterton's families. But the best example I know of is in the Bronte sisters' father's deliberate break with his Ireland-bound family (to which he was most attached), in order to find opportunities for himself and the family he knew he would have one day. Where the generations appear to link up is in their shared ambitions, social skills, values, and ideals (even if they don't speak of them as such).

Before going on I want to point out that contrary to myths and some loose conventional wisdom, it is a benefit for a family to have achieved a middle or upper-middle social status, because of what this permits its members in the way of resources of which choice and disposable time are the most valuable after talent. (See section on Immersion below.) It is in pursuit of this level of social attainment and resources that every early family member I know of has made their "break" into an unclear, unguaranteed future.

Intergenerational and Transgenerational Transfer Processes
In researching Eliot's heritage and family life (Albert, 1992), I became aware of an experience he had in common with other eminent persons, which was exposure to two rather distinct but related levels of family "time" and information that were constantly involved in his development. Their origins, content and significance made up what I call Intergenerational and Transgenerational family transfer processes. Although they are distinguishable from one another, it is important to understand that each set of processes influences the transfers and effects of the other. More to the point, it appears that when both sets of transfer processes are actively present in a family and focused on talent then the possibilities of that talent leading to eminence are greatly promoted. This has been certainly true for Eliot, Churchill, and other eminent Western persons. Whether or not this will remain the case in the future is not clear to me in the light of the widespread changes in Western demographics and families the past quarter of a century.

Be that as it may, these two terms, intergenerational and transgenerational, are meant to characterize the main historical sources and directions of exchange rather than only the contents. Family messages can and do change over the years. And they should if they are to be flexible and applicable to new situations. Yet having said this we need to acknowledge that these contents cannot change too much or abruptly, no matter what the circumstances, without the serious risk of becoming disconnected from earlier family members and irrelevant to the present one. Too rapid a change could leave a family not only without survival skills and formative values, but even worse, a family could lose its senses of identity and historical continuity acquired over time.

Now for details:

Intergenerational Family Transfer Processes operate horizontally primarily in the present to near future--in the here and now. Its content is made up of every day information and interactions between or among family members in frequent context with one another. These interactions are highly contingent on the requirements of the family's proximal contexts. Therefore, intergenerational processes are chiefly proximal in their sources and immediate in their effects, or meant to be. In fact, these conditions are where most of these transfers' power and importance come from. More to the point, intergenerational processes help to establish and maintain the relationships between family members and, to a lesser degree, with extended families, and in the process they emphasize the on-going interactive reciprocity within families. Here, one needs to be aware of an important characteristic of family relationships. There are different degrees of influence, resources, and knowledge made available among these relationships because of favoritism, degrees of identification, affection, etc. Because of this, intergenerational processes govern the conditions and lines of interdependency among family relationships and, because interdependence does not require mutuality or equality, often when we look into a family we find that what is directed to or offered one member is not necessarily made available to another. And this is exactly where gender, birth-order, and giftedness enter into the silent calculus of families' transfers. The basic characteristics of intergenerational transfer processes are horizontal, short-term, proximal, and direct.

Transgenerational Family Transfer Processes operate vertically from a person(s) in the family's past into the present, and--always--hopefully on into the indefinite future. The origins of these transfers' content and influences are distal, often to the point of being vague and difficult for a contemporary member to locate or articulate Nonetheless, these transfers are remarkably powerful as the sources of valuable family norms, levels of earlier achievements and present aspirations, and operational prescriptions taking the form of family traditions and doctrine. A wonderful illustration of how this works is Winston Churchill. Churchill, the elder son of two sons, wrote a four-volume biography of his great ancestor The First Duke of Marlborough when he was alone, left out of government office in the 1930s, and contemplating a bleak future. And we know that T. S. Eliot's early education focused constantly upon good works and hard work as an Eliot obligation. Not all families (of eminent persons or not) are so conscious of or can so clearly present their history as the Churchills, the Ellingtons, the Martin Luther Kings, and the Eliots. When they do, this history often contributes directly to the direction and motivation for achievement of a family member or two (e.g., Churchill, father and son; Alex Haley, the author of Roots).

What we have been doing is more or less descriptive; what we need to answer is what makes these transfers such powerful agents? Oddly enough, transgenerational transfers for all of their distance, when we find them we see that they can convey remarkably clear messages and establish connections of significance across large spans of time and space from one generation to others. Not only do they give historical continuity, but they can instill in members a feeling of contact and responsibility to and from one generation to another beyond contiguous generations. By way of summary, we can say the key characteristics of transgenerational transfer processes are vertical, longitudinal, distal, and indirect.

Having said this, I want to stress that I believe that whatever their other characteristics, eminence-achieving families are almost always transgenerationally oriented families. Where we have sufficient information about a family (and Chaucer's is as good a test of this as any), it gives evidence that the transmission of lessons and emphases has been deliberate, important, and distinctive to this family. I find quite interesting the number of eminent persons in a variety of fields who are acutely aware of their family histories, how they are personally part of that history (e.g., Swift's 1755 autobiography) and how it bestows importance to them as it contributes skills and a sense of significance to the individual beyond what they may acquire alone. Paradoxically, the power of these generational linkages also is demonstrated through their absence in Chatterton's life and his own desperate efforts to fabricate them from the weakest of materials, and through Samuel Johnson's (Bate, 1975) successful efforts as an adolescent in ingratiating himself into a more established family which initially he assumed he might be related to.

From this short discussion, the reader can see that much can he determined about the differences among families in their goals and cohesiveness when we are aware of whether a particular family operates primarily in terms of either intergenerational or transgenerational or possibly both sets of processes. Examples of the first type of family would be Thomas Chatterton's family (Nevill, 1948), of the second type of family, predominantly a transgeneralizational oriented family is Douglas MacArthur's, and of a family deeply involved in both sets of processes, Eliot's. Having noticed this, it occurs to me that many (eminent) politicians are from families in which both types of transfers are active and that this may have much to do with the attraction of careers in political processes with their dual accent upon continuity and change (see Barber, 1985).

An important question remains, and it is how these sets of transfers are involved in facilitating the development of creativity A bit speculative, but I think that for families that are primarily intergenerational with their emphasis on strong boundaries and differences from other families, the thrust of their socialization will center within the family and be oriented to the demands within its immediate environment. Their transfers are likely to be determined more by status and conventions than history. As such, this particular type of family orientation is likely to be authoritarian, or at least strongly conventional. According to the research data of Dacey (1989), Getzels and Jackson (1962), and Harrington, Block, and Block (1992) this type of orientation is less able to engender a high level of creativeness among its members than others. On the other hand, because transgenerational transfers occur within and through families, they not only connect within families, but stand a good chance of freeing them from proximal pressures and narrow perspectives. This can enrich these families in a number of significant ways-intellectually and emotionally being perhaps the most influential areas in their parenting. (Remember, a transcontinental trip does not skirt the outlines of a continent but passes through the heart of it.)

So, we find that long surviving and eminence achieving families (which are often one and the same), are also usually transgenerationally as well as intergenerationally their parents and they from their earlier families. Each parent cannot help bring history, oriented. Insofar as many of the important actions taken, decisions made, and relationships entered into by an individual, whether or not he or she is completely conscious of these sources, involves some lessons and skills learned (Mondell & Tyler, 1981) from expectations, and some pertinent skills into their family unit; doing this they also contribute to making their family a multi-leveled system of information. Thus, if there is one specific methodological lesson to learn from this, it is that in order to understand with depth and comprehensiveness the "whys" and "hows" of a family we need to start our search with grandparents.

Transfer Processes and Parents' Personalities
However, knowing that there are different types of family transfer processes is one thing, knowing how they come to impact upon a child's behavior and development is another and raises two questions; How does a parent's history and personality relate to one another--if they do--and secondly, what specific aspect of the parent's personality (trait, values, wishes) is most involved with each of the basic family transfer processes? Previous research (Albert, 1991, 1992; Albert & Runco, 1987) has produced evidence that parents' influences upon children are fairly discreet, on one level coming through their personality dispositions (as measured on the California Personality Inventory and the Loevinger Sentence Completion Test), and on another level, through their values and emphasis for such behavior as achievement or intellectuality (as measured by Majoribank's Family Interviews). While the results are clear enough, the relationship between personality dispositions and family presses is clarified by Conley's (1985) distinction between personality traits and personality styles. This distinction helps to settle several developmental questions: Why childhood personality traits do not explain well, and are not significantly correlated with, later real-world creativity; and secondly, why early personality traits do not predict well, later adult personality development over large spans of time. According to Conley (1985), the reasons for this lack of continuity lies in the developmental make-up of traits and styles. According to Conley, personality traits are based largely on temperament; they are generalized emotional response patterns which function as behavioral tendencies. An example is a person's degree of extraversion which is the extent the individual is attuned to seeking and maintaining contact with other people. On the other hand, personality styles are learned patterns of preferences expressed as long term values and interests (e.g., high intellectuality, an interest in history). I think that perhaps even aptitudes should be included among styles because they have in common the ability to orient and pre-dispose an individual to participate in or avoid specific groups of activities. Conley makes an additional point about personality styles that is helpful in understanding their role in a child's development. Personality styles as preferences are related to and imbedded in one's social and cultural contexts. Accordingly, it is "the contextual quality of the personality styles" that explains why they emerge later in life than personality traits. Traits being based upon temperament are more genetic in origin and physiological in their nature; therefore, they are less dependent on the environment and activated earlier in life. Styles, while not completely divorced from an individual's temperament, are acquired "in the process of (the individual) working through the complicated patterns of the environment", and this makes them more of a developmental product through extensive learning and exploration of the environment, of finding and remembering what works.

Keeping these distinctions in mind we see that what a child first and most directly experiences of their parents' behavior, as it is directed toward him/her, are their personality traits. As behaviors, these are concrete, observable, and immediate in their effects upon the child. In fact, I believe that traits establish the earliest conditions (and measures) of reciprocity between parents' and a child's behaviors in that both parents' and a child's interactions are loaded with feelings and priorities. Of the two, it is the emotional quality of traits that make this aspect of parents easy to learn as reinforcements and through observations because it requires much less abstraction and other high level cognitive processing on the part of the child to learn about the parents' personality traits, than is necessary to deduce their styles. Moreover, because there are some degrees of temperamental and cognitive similarities between the biological parents and their child, this too "makes" the parent-child identifications easier and earlier to form than those involving such abstract and embedded behaviors as parental preferences and styles. In addition, what we have here is an expression of a child sharing in the parents' talent-richness, whatever its degree and domain. Coupling this to possible similarities between a parent's and child's birth-orders, especially when they are the same sex, would add to their similarities and these could facilitate their mutual understanding, identifications, and behavioral similarities, (e.g., Churchill, MacArthur, and young Chatterton specifically; the many fathers and sons-and now daughters--in the same or similar careers). On the other hand, values and interests by their nature are more likely to be communicated episodically, over a broad period of time, in a variety of settings, and not always through the same behaviors. For a child, gifted or not, to perceive, understand, and relate them to a parent's behavior and then his or her own would demand that they pay close attention to the parents over time and in different contexts in order to abstract the commonalities running through the parents' values and interests. Needless to say, this requires more than focus on the part of the child. It depends on close parent-child relationships with some consistency in each parent's behaviors.

All of this is made even more complicated by early childhood egocentricity which is influenced by gender and birth-order. The young child's natural egocentricity "selects" and certainly sharpens the impact of only some of the parents' traits which accompany the bulk of intergenerational transfers between parents and children. But because most transgenerational transfer processes center on parental styles and express family values, traditions, histories, and occupational preferences (the family's "business"), they naturally should come into a child's development later, just as they did for the parents. It seems reasonable to expect that if these messages are weak in one generation, there is the possibility that they may be even weaker or missed by the next generation; and therefore, it is possible for a child to display considerable behavioral--trait--similarity to a parent, but not much in the way of long term preferences, either their own or their parents'.

This says nothing about childhood negativism or the need for separation and individualization which is so much a part and expression of adolescence. Nonetheless, whereas the child and later the adolescent may deliberately reject its parents' behavior (usually the same-sex one), they often "unconsciously" absorb their styles. Again, examples of this are Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, and Thomas Chatterton who took on many of their father's gestures, postures, and preferences.

To quickly recapitulate: Intergenerational transfer processes involve day-to-day behaviors; these are more involved with a parents' traits. Because they are concrete and repetitive, therefore, they are easier for a young child to observe and learn than transgenerational transfer processes which involve parental styles as values and other abstractions. As such, they are not likely to be constantly or consistently demonstrated by one or both parents. This makes personality styles more vague and difficult for a child to spot and understand. This is where a family may assist the child to acquire preferences (even if they drop them later) by being explicit about its own preferences and history, because nothing helps a child's personality development more than a sense of continuity and boundaries with which and against which to react.

Education
Over the years various writers have discussed the relation of education to talent and giftedness. As we know it is one of the longest lasting debates in Western culture (Addison, 1983). While Addison was speaking from the perspective of the English Enlightenment, many others closer to our times and interests have also discussed the issues involved. It is far from a hollow issue. Among my readings, some of which I have presented in this paper, there is a constant phenomenon in the lives of eminent men and women which appears in nearly every gifted and talented person's development. This is their informal education. Because it is almost always involved in the development, this makes me believe that it is essential to the development and transformation of these gifts and talents into creativeness of the highest order.

As one would expect, the farther back in time one goes, the less available or easily accessed information is regarding a person's education. Yet for all of the histories I have looked into, I have seen that they do find ways to obtain sufficient formal educations (e.g., Chaucer). It is important to keep in mind that we are talking about bright, educatable persons whose developmental histories are loaded with early signs of giftedness. Nonetheless, the most striking aspect about eminent persons' education is that it starts early on two tracks: a formal one and a more self-determined informal one. These processes are not parallels but are complementary educational processes. As its name implies, one's formal education is conventional and consists of the basics expected of most people at that particular time. Among eminent-to-be children more times than not, there is a resistance to getting only a formal education without the opportunity for engaging in an informal one more to one's liking (e.g., Ellington). At times there is even open disrespect and rebellion (e.g., Chatterton) to the formal processes and curriculum. Even the three Bronte sisters (to say nothing of their two older sisters) rejected formal schooling through their many illnesses and bouts of separation anxiety which would spread from one child to the other like the plague as first one child then another would go away to school.

Regardless of how the child handles this situation, there are two questions that this raises: how do they know what it is they want and are missing so early in life? Only Chaucer and Ellington seem to have had enough models and encouragement from others to have acquired this awareness. Other subjects were less guided by others except by way of pressure to undergo a formal education. There are two fascinating aspects to this. One is that the child would usually be the first one to decide what they needed to learn about and what was not being taught to them formally. Off hand, I do not know of a parent that initiated this. Secondly, once the informal education began, most parents would stand aside as long as the child's education and socialization happened to meet the prevailing conventions (e.g., Ellington's family). When a parent did try to intervene, as in the case of Chatterton, they soon had a rebellious, willful child to contend with. Frankly, there appeared to be little that either parents or schools could do that would halt or trim back this informal education once the child began it; they seemed to increasingly take on lives of their own. On another level this goes far beyond childish stubbornness; it indicates the strength of the child's sense of self and boundaries. While curiosity is certainly one source of this motivation, another powerful source is the child's precociously-developed self and the child's need to experience it, expand it, and protect it.

If I am correct here about this need for and engagement in informal education, we have two related early prognostic signs of the child's drive for self-determination arid their capacity for creative behavior because the motivation one sees propelling this type of education could be preparation for, and the forerunner of, creative behavior. Chambers (1964) describes similar initiative behaviors among creative scientists. He found that they did not sit around nor like to wait to be told what to do, but as a group they preferred to set their own problems and pace. Just as important is a second consequence of a child's participation in their informal education; it leads naturally into the transformation of early giftedness into creative potential through a period of immersion.

Immersion
Throughout these biographies as well as Eliot's, I have mentioned the presence and results of a special period of intense engagement and exploration I call immersion. The necessary occurrence and influence of this period in the achievement of eminence should not be ignored. From all that I have observed of it, immersion is the active bridge between early potential and the eventual mature realization of one's gifts and talents.

It goes without saying that all early gifts and talents are initially raw, untutored, but that generally they do not remain so for long. Even though we know that some talents are extremely rare in their earliest manifestations (e.g., a Mozart in music, a Ramanujan in mathematics), almost all talents, once they are identified and become valued by others, simply do not remain fallow and untutored for long, but undergo intense selective encouragement and education, formal and informal, within and outside the family. This sequence of involvement has great developmental importance because it underlies what is perhaps an essential experience in the achievement of eminence, which is the prolonged experience of immersion that takes place during the adolescent to early adult development of many eminent persons. Regardless of the domains of their talent, I believe this often decade-long experience is the most decisive one in potentiating and training early gifts and talents if they are to become capable of sustaining career efforts into eminence. (Frankly, I know of no eminent person whose developmental history does not show signs of this decade-long effort.) Equally significant is the fact that this exploration and involvement takes place in adolescence because this timing argues that immersion must be based upon a necessary level of maturation.

In order to help the reader see what I am referring to, here are two instances of immersion. The first is also one of the best known examples of immersion, and it is found in Einstein's development, and career. In his autobiography, Einstein (Schlipp, 1949) tells us that he hit upon the concept of relativity when he was 16 years old. We know from other sources that from then on he was preoccupied with it until he had mastered this problem. Just as important for us is that his conclusions from this intense period became public ten years later with the publication of his five astounding papers in 1905 in the Annalen der Physics.

The other example of immersion is perhaps less well-known. It is the Bronte sisters. All of them, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, were constructing elaborate stories to tell to one another from their earliest years, some even before they could fully write them down. Over the years many of their stories were interwoven in to a saga, "Gondal," to which they each contributed. From fragments that still exist (Frank, 1990), we see that more than anything, this was an inner world made external in the telling. Much of what went into their stories was a mixture of their inner life and the external real-world news of the day as they understood it. What is amazing and touching to learn is that this ongoing composition continued well into the sisters' early 20s. It made up for their lack of a mother who died with two older daughters when the girls were young, and the lack of an interesting, inviting outer world. From what we know, even more of a preparation for the Gothic novels, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights to come, were the "Bed Plays" that Charlotte and Emily made up for as many years as they shared a small bed at night. They were only spoken at night when Charlotte and Emily were away from the others, and went on for hours, no matter what either sister's mood was. Only severe illness would interrupt them. These plays were far more personal than the saga, and remained known only to the two sisters for years. So much a mixture of the two girls, scholars speculate what parts of the "Bed Plays" eventually went into their later novels.

I believe that one consequence of the continuous long-term interest in and exercise of one's gifts through immersion is the one feature of adult creative behavior that distinguishes it from early childhood's. This is an adult's greater intentionality in what, when, and why he or she is being creative. It is possible to observe this developmental difference in adulthood. Years ago MacKinnon (1978) noted that involvement in a problem differed for his creative subjects and their controls. The former would at times break from the particular task at hand, but would return until the goal was reached. Whereas, the so-called "non-creative" group would be just as involved initially, but once their interest waned, or was frustrated, they would often drop the work and not return to it. For most of childhood, creative behavior follows this pattern, being primarily contextual and episodic rather than personally deliberate and prolonged. This basic difference argues that important metacognitive skills as well as more task-related ones are acquired during immersion.

Yet for even the most gifted child, in order for this period to occur parents and others need to both realistically acknowledge the child's gifts and commit sonic of their own time, emotion, energy, finances, and experience to locating, recruiting, and making available appropriate resources inside and outside of the home (Bloom, 1985). My impression is that for whatever the domain differences are in how immersion is initiated, and there appears to be a basic difference between the talented science-oriented child with his or her crystallizing experience according to Walters and Gardner (1986), and the focal relationships of the non-science oriented talented child (Albert, 1991), the experience leads to many of the same results in the transformation of a potential into a talent that more and more comes under the individual's controlling it.

So much for some of the prominent developmental consequences of immersion. The fact that it is almost always a decade long also helps explain why the median age, 24-27 years, is the age at which most eminent-to-be persons produce their earliest major work in different domains (e.g., Thomas Mann, a high school dropout, published his first great novel Buddenbrooks in 1990 at age 25, and most sports figures hit their best years of performance around age 25-27) (Albert, 1975; Bloom, 1985; Cox, 1926; Hayes, 1981; Raskin, 1936; Simonton, 1984). What we notice in this and most examples is that there are two identifiable ages involved, one of initiation and one of completion, and that they are so stable they strongly suggest that there are (at least) two levels of maturation involved in immersion. Between 12-16 years of age is the age during which we often notice the first sustained individually-involved exploration of talent and self. The second period between 16-26 years old is equally clear. For almost all eminent persons studied, including some of the not yet eminent subjects in my longitudinal project (Albert & Spangler, 1992), this phase usually runs the same length of time (roughly 10 years). It is during this phase that career decisions are solidified and committed to with an understanding of their long term implications for the individual. Although different combinations of skills and learning experiences are involved, depending on what fields and domains (e.g., baseball compared with writing poetry), the age of initiation, the length of time immersion takes, and the age of mature performances are all about the same from one domain to another, one culture to another, person to person. This certainly argues that the age of integrated maturity physically, cognitively, and emotionally is later than we believe. In addition, gender is the one prevailing source of variance in this process that I can spot (Helson & Wink, 1987), and this, too, would argue for maturation being involved in it. Moreover, gender differences demonstrates how the interactions between maturation and context could be a major source of differences in the timing (Thelen & Ulrich, 1991), and consequences of immersion among talented men and women.

One caution: In spite of its ubiquity, we should not be lulled into believing that immersion is always successful or completed, because it is not. This is evident in those personal, lifelong preoccupations that many creative persons carry within themselves and their work, made from specific events and shocks experienced in the earlier years. Sometimes these may appear full blown and at other times in disguise.

Often, especially in a productive career, their appearances are predictable. Reynolds Price (1993), himself an author filled with his own early family years, believes that many of these highly personal motifs and situations are the undigested replicas of a gifted child's early "primal scene." Unlike Freud, for Price this scene is not necessarily sexual, but it is so emotionally loaded and overpowering even the most gifted child (perhaps for that very reason) cannot always absorb it. Nor for that matter, as we find in the work of Reynolds himself and many others, can the adult the child becomes always fully master their experiences. They come at us in a variety of tones--some are sad as in Conrad and in Eliot, and manic as in Philip Roth. It doesn't matter; we see and hear the child within the adult. For example:

Even the voices of writers as wide-gauged as Tolstoy or Proust are grounded in a single scene, most often a lingering sight from childhood or early youth. And that scene is almost always one that a seasoned reader may well suspect lies near the start of a writer's reason for writing, the physical moment in which a single enormous question rose before a watchful child and fueled the lifelong search for an answer.

In Tolstoy, it's the terrible moment in a bright county house when a boy barely two years old hears the news of his mother's death and senses that he stands alone, doomed to the orphan's endless starvation for perfect love. (Price 1993, p. 1, 25, emphasis added)

References

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