Edward Fröhlich Haskell (August 24, 1906 – 1990) was a synergic scientist who dedicated his life to the unification of human knowledge into a single discipline.
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Biography
Haskell was born in Phillipopolis, now Plovdiv, Bulgaria. His mother was a Swiss missionary, Elisabeth Fröhlich, who married an American missionary, Edward Bell Haskell, who himself was born in Bulgaria of American missionary parents. During his childhood, the family traveled widely throughout Europe (as a result he learned to speak six languages), before returning to the United States. Haskell attended Oberlin College in 1929, where he met Willard Quine who became a lifelong friend. After obtaining his B.A. in 1929, Haskell did a year of graduate studies at Columbia University.
While hitchhiking during his days as an Oberlin student, Haskell met two wealthy sisters named Reynolds; they were from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. He so impressed them with his ideas and originality that they set up a trust fund to help support him. This situation appears to have led Haskell to disdain pursuing his research within the context of conventional employment. He lived most of his life alone in a cramped and cluttered student apartment near Columbia University, purchased for him by his half-brother Douglass Haskell and sister-in-law Helen Haskell. Haskell maintained close relations with both his full and half brothers and sisters throughout his life. Married twice, he had no children of his own.
Haskell employed the leisure afforded him by his good fortune to travel and write a book, Lance—A Novel about Multicultural Men (published in 1941) before resuming his graduate studies, this time at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Although he became a Fellow at University of Chicago in 1940, he never completed his thesis and was not awarded the Ph.D. He left Chicago to teach sociology and anthropology at the University of Denver and Brooklyn College. In 1948, he left teaching to devote himself full-time to private research.