Frederick Ogden Nash was born in Rye, New York, to Edmund Strudwick and Mattie Chenault Nash, both of Southern stock. Nash's great-great-grandfather was governor of North Carolina during the Revolution, and that ancestor's brother was General Francis Nash, for whom Nashville, Tennessee, was named. This pedigree did not in the least restrain the poet-inheritor of the Nash name from gently but thoroughly deflating genealogical pretensions, along with other pomposities, in his verses. He was raised in Savannah, Georgia, and several other East Coast cities, as his father's import-export business necessitated that the Nashes make frequent moves. Nash described his unique accent as "Clam chowder of the East Coast--New England with a little Savannah at odd moments" and attributed it to the influence of his family's peripatetic existence during his formative years. Following his secondary education from 1917 to 1920 at St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island, Nash attended Harvard for the 1920-1921 academic year, and then, as he put it, he "had to drop out to earn a living." He first tried teaching at his alma mater, but after a year he fled from St.
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