BBB, Bob Pirsig

Pirsig was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Maynard E. Pirsig and Harriet Marie Sjobeck, and is of German and Swedish descent.[1] His father, Maynard Pirsig, was a Harvard Law School graduate, who began teaching at the University of Minnesota Law School in 1934. The elder Pirsig served as dean of the college of law from 1948 to 1955, before retiring from there in 1970. He later became a professor at the William Mitchell College of Law, where he remained until his final retirement in 1993.[2]

Because he was a precocious child, with an I.Q. of 170 at age 9, Robert Pirsig skipped several grades[1] and was enrolled at Blake School, an institution for gifted children. In 1943, Pirsig entered the University of Minnesota to study biochemistry. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he described himself as being far from a typical student. He was an idealist of a sort, interested in science as a goal in itself, rather than as a way to establish a career.

While doing biochemical lab work, Pirsig was greatly bothered by the fact that there was always more than one workable hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon, and that the number of such hypotheses seemed almost unlimited. He could not think of any way around this, and to him it seemed that the whole scientific endeavor had been brought to a halt, in some sense. This question so distracted him that he was dismissed from the university for failing grades.

In 1946, Pirsig enlisted in the Army, and served in Korea until he was discharged in 1948.

Upon being discharged, he returned to the United States and briefly settled in Seattle, Washington, before he returned to the University of Minnesota and completed his B.A. in philosophy in 1950. He then attended Banaras Hindu University in India to learn about Eastern Philosophy. He also did graduate work in philosophy and journalism at the University of Chicago, but did not obtain a degree. His difficult experiences as a student in a course taught by Richard McKeon are described, thinly disguised, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.[3] In 1958, he became a professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, where he taught creative writing courses for two years.

After suffering a nervous breakdown, Pirsig spent time in and out of mental hospitals from 1961 " 1963. After undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression, and was treated with shock therapy. Pirsig had made a progressive recovery and had discontinued psychotherapy in 1964. He later began working as a freelance writer.

In years following the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he has lived a solitary and reclusive lifestyle, much like writer J. D. Salinger. Pirsig has travelled around the Atlantic by boat, and has resided in Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, England, and in various places around the United States since 1980