Ted Berrigan--Edmund Joseph Michael Berrigan Jr.--was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the oldest of three children of Margaret Dugan and Edmund Berrigan, the chief engineer at Ward's Baking Company. On both sides the family was Irish Catholic. Berrigan attended local schools and entered Providence College, a local Catholic school, but left after a year and enlisted in the army.

Berrigan was sent to Korea in 1954 but never saw action. Sixteen months later he returned to the United States and was based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He enrolled in the University of Tulsa under the GI bill, receiving his B.A. in 1959 and his M.A. in 1962, after writing his master's thesis on Bernard Shaw. Berrigan returned the diploma for his master's degree to the university with a note saying that he was "the master of no art"; he was, he would tell friends, a poet because he wrote...