Milton Meltzer was born on May 8, 1915, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Both of his parents immigrated to the United States during the great exodus of Europeans in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and his father was employed as a window cleaner when Meltzer was born. He grew up in a multinational neighborhood near Boston and attended a public school designed to encourage a strong sense of American identity among children of various backgrounds. His family was Jewish but rarely attended religious services, and Meltzer remembers that he identified his own cultural background far more with England than any other country.

Meltzer attended Classical High School, a college preparatory school, and entered Columbia University in 1932 to prepare for a career in education. He studied with such famous professors as anthropologists Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, and the philosopher John Dewey. He also became an avid...