Allan Wooley

I was born and lived in a mill town in the White Mountains of Maine. At the age of 10 my family moved to a farm near a pond about twelve miles away from the mill town; I left the farm at 17 to go to and graduate from a prep school in New Hampshire and then back to Maine to go to college. At that point I was drafted and had my physical and mental exams but before I was inducted, I was given a waiver to attend graduate school. During that four year stint I spent one year studying in Germany. From college on, where I majored on Classics and minored in philosophy, I followed the same pattern. I ended up with a PhD in classical philology and taught for five years in North Carolina before returning to New Hampshire to teach Greek, Latin, and philosophy at my prep school.

Early in my career there at Phillips Exeter I became interested in computer programming and midway in my career I was coordinator of academic computing for five years. At the end of that job, I moved out of the dorms, returned full time to the classics department as department chair, and became heavily involved professionally outside the school, mainly with the Classical Association of New England and its summer institute at Dartmouth. I continued my interest in computer programming and computer assisted instruction (CAI), moving more and more onto the web and into web coding. Towards the end of my career I spent a year in Italy teaching classics at School Year Abroad in Viterbo.

My wife and I retired to the NE Kingdom of Vermont where I continue my interest and work both in the classics and in computing, while my wife has her horses and all that entails. In my book most of the stories come from my life before leaving Maine. The poems started as part of my teaching Latin literature and in that endeavor from writing poems in Latin to demonstrate things like the use of figures of speech; gradually I moved into writing in English and in its metres and rhymes. My involvement with essays began in school as that of most students; my first 'scholarly' effort so-called was at prep school and continued throughout my life. Most of the essays included in the book are recent and are part of an attempt to come to some conclusions in my interpretation of Plato and about some basic philosophic problems in general. More on the book at http://awooley.com.