Shapley was born on November 2, 1885, in Nashville, Missouri. He received the equivalent of a fifth-grade education and went to nearby Pittsburg, Kansas, where he took a business course. He became a reporter and, at the age of sixteen, moved to Joplin, Missouri, to become a police reporter. Later he enrolled in the Presbyterian Carthage Collegiate Institute in Carthage, Missouri, and graduated after a year and a half and went on to the University of Missouri in 1907, planning to enter the new School of Journalism. A delay in the opening of that school interfered, so Shapley became involved in astronomy almost by accident. He received a B.A. degree in 1910 and an M.A. in 1911, with honors in mathematics and physics.

After graduation, Shapley began working with astronomer Henry Norris Russell at Princeton University on eclipsing binary stars. The two men were able to gain a great deal of...