"Charles Fort was born [August 6, 1874] into a fairly prosperous family of Dutch immigrants who owned a wholesale grocery business in Albany, New York State. He was the eldest of three brothers - the others being Clarence, and the youngest, Raymond. Their mother died within a few years of Clarence's birth and Fort's father married again during Fort's teens."
"Beatings by his tyrannical father helped set him against authority and dogma, as he declares in the remaining fragments of his autobiography Many Parts. Escaping home at the age of 18, he worked as a reporter in New York City before hitch-hiking through Europe "to put some capital into the bank of experience." In 1896, aged 22, he contracted malaria in South Africa and returned to New York where he married Anna Filan (or Filing), an English servant girl in his father's house."
More: http://www.forteana.org/html/fortbiog.html#hermit
Garrison Keillor visited the Writers Institute (the largest crowd we have been privileged to host) in September 2003: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/keillor_garrison.html
