Background
Robert Wasson was born on September 22, 1898 in Great Falls, Montana, United States, in the family of Edmund Atwill and Mary Matilda (DeVeny) Wasson.
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1972
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1980
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1992
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2000
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2013
Robert Wasson was born on September 22, 1898 in Great Falls, Montana, United States, in the family of Edmund Atwill and Mary Matilda (DeVeny) Wasson.
Robert received Bachelor of Letters at Columbia University in 1920. He also attended the University of Lyons in France, and the London School of Economics.
Robert worked in the 1920s as a writer for various newspapers, including the New Haven Register and the New York Herald Tribune, and served as associate editor of Current Opinion. Towards the end of the 1920s Wasson left journalism and began his banking career.
Wasson began his banking career at Guaranty Trust Company in 1928, and moved to J.P. Morgan & Co. in 1934, where he became a vice president in 1943. Also that year, Wasson published a book on the Hall Carbine Affair. Wasson stayed at Morgan’s company until he retired from the banking profession in 1963.
Robert and his wife launched a new science they described as “ethnomycology,” the study of mushrooms in various cultures throughout the world. With his wife, Wasson studied mushrooms in Russia and produced the two-volume "Mushrooms, Russia, and History."
In 1957 Wasson became an honorary research fellow in ethnomycology at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University. In 1969 he published "Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality", which is probably his best-known book.
Among Wasson’s ensuing books are "Maria Sabina and Her Mazatec Mushroom Velada", a 1974 volume on which he served as co-editor, "The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries", a 1978 work that he wrote with Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck, and "The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica", a 1980 publication in which Wasson recounts his experiences as a participant decades earlier in mushroom rituals. Another volume that he coedited, "Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion", appeared in 1986.
In 1926, Robert married a pediatrician Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, but she died in 1958. They had a son Peter and daughter Mary Xenia.
