Oliver Butterworth was born on May 23, 1915, in Hartford, Connecticut, a town which had once been the residence of the famous American authors Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

One of three children, he grew up in a nearby farmhouse surrounded by pasture and woodland. Raised by his father after his mother's death, Butterworth attended high school at a boy's boarding school in the western part of the state.

After graduation he attended Dartmouth and earned a bachelor's degree in 1937.

Butterworth began his teaching career as an instructor in English and Latin at a school for boys. In 1940 he married Miriam Brooks, a young woman who shared his enthusiasm for the outdoors, and together they raised four children.

In the meantime, he continued his schooling and spent a single summer at Harvard as a graduate student in 1941.

He obtained his master's degree from Vermont's Middlebury...