The American psychologist B. F. Skinner was renowned for his pioneering work in behaviorism. Born on March 20, 1904, in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, Burrhus Frederic Skinner was the older son of Grace Madge Burrhus Skinner and William Arthur Skinner, an attorney with some political aspirations. Skinner's younger brother died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm at the age of sixteen. Skinner did his undergraduate work at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he majored in English. During the summer before his senior year, he studied at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury, Vermont. There he met Robert Frost, who asked Skinner to send him some of his work. Frost's comments encouraged Skinner to try writing, at first in his parents' home and later in New York City's Greenwich Village. He discovered that "I had nothing important to say" (Skinner, 1970, p. 7). He then turned...