His mother was a teacher, his father an insurance executive: together they provided a comfortable home for Patterson and his three younger sisters. Although he graduated class valedictorian in 1965 from St. Patrick's, a Christian Brothers school, Patterson told Andre Bernard and Jeff Zaleski of
Publishers Weekly that as a teenager he read reluctantly; perfunctory teaching of required texts such as
Silas Marner "crushed the life out of books," depriving him of the pleasures of reading until later in his life.
He majored in English at Manhattan College, and worked the first summer as an aide at McLean Hospital, a mental institute near Boston. Patterson began to read on the night shift, his new interest bolstered by a friendship with the poet Robert Lowell, who was under treatment for depression at McLean at the time. Lowell read aloud to his fellow patients and talked to Patterson about writing. Over that summer, he began writing, aiming eventually to get a job in academia. Patterson entered the graduate program at Vanderbilt University but soon discovered that teaching was not for him. Instead of the usual literary analysis, he submitted a novel for his master's thesis in 1970.
Never Planned To Be A Writer
The next year, he had told Bernard and Zaleski that he had "a pivotal experience" when he began reading commercial fiction, including such popular novels as The Exorcist and The Day of the Jackal.
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