Word: self-taught
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Right Hand, Left Hand. Bargains, legal and otherwise, have never failed to interest Juan March. Son of a Spanish peasant who was also a small-time smuggler, he was born on the Balearic island of Majorca, had little formal schooling, was largely self-taught. With only a $300 inheritance from his father, he set himself up in the smuggling trade while still in his teens, showed such talent that he soon had a fleet of schooners smuggling tobacco into Spain from North Africa. By 1914 he was displaying the trappings of respectability: his smuggling fleet was so large that...
...secretly accumulated a weird library from bookstore trash boxes, and its contents filled his mind, but nothing fitted anything he had to do in the world. Thus, when fired from his first good job as the world's worst railway freight clerk, he spoke that night in his self-taught Gaelic to a Gaelic League meeting on the character of Goethe. In short, a hopeless case. If ever a man became a writer because there was nothing else in the world he could do, it was Frank O'Connor...
...wander around, bum about, starve a bit." It was not until 1925, when he was 22, that he settled down in Manhattan to attend Max Weber's art classes at the Art Students League. He did not stay long. As a painter, Mark Rothko is almost wholly self-taught...
...lanky fellow with a fanatic's fiery eyes, Geneticist Trofim Lysenko was Stalin's favorite scientist. Thirteen years ago, he blossomed before the world as the self-taught despot of Soviet biological science, proclaiming his fantastic dogma that Communists could change nature at will. Riding high, he terrorized his rivals, shipping to prison or disgrace all Soviet biologists who defended the orthodox axiom that basic traits are transmitted by genes that cannot be changed by training the parent organism. Lysenko's dictatorship died with Stalin. But now Lysenko is back in bloom, not as a declaimer...
...LAST OF THE JUST, by André Schwarz-Bart. Through one family, a bitter, largely self-taught first novelist follows the unrelenting horror of anti-Semitism from medieval England to Hitler's Germany. The author's grim tale belies his dictum: "To be a Jew is impossible...