He figured prominently in the creation of the New Journalism, has developed and continues to produce accessible political history, and remains an astute critic of current events.
Garry Laurence Wills was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on 22 May 1934 to John H. Wills, an appliance salesman, and Mayno Collins Wills, but was reared mostly in southern Michigan, where his mother worked for the State Department of Unemployment. His mother's family were devout Catholics, and Wills was educated in Catholic schools. At the age of seventeen he entered the Society of Jesus and was sent by the Jesuits to study philosophy at St. Louis University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1957. Although he abandoned plans to study for the priesthood, he subsequently earned a master of arts degree in classics in 1958 from the Jesuit-run Xavier University in Cincinnati, and a master of arts degree in classics from Yale University in 1959, finishing his doctorate in classics with a dissertation on Aeschylus at the latter institution in 1961. He taught as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington D.C., in 1961, before accepting an appointment as an assistant professor in the department of classics at Johns Hopkins University in 1962.
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