The Ohio Connection

“I never liked Cincinnati when I lived there. I love it now. Both of these expressions are honest – I never liked myself until I began to write. Then everything began to make sense.”

--Thomas Berger, Cincinnati Enquirer, January 1959.

• Thomas Berger was born in 1927 and raised in Lockland, Ohio, a small neighborhood just north of Cincinnati.
• Berger graduated from Lockland High School when he was 15 years old.
• He attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, but left before graduating, in 1943, to join the army during World War II.
• When Berger returned from the army in 1946, he reentered college at the University of Cincinnati, graduating with a bachelor’s degree, cum laude, in 1948.
• Berger’s pursuit of a graduate degree led him to Columbia University in New York; after that he would never again live in Ohio.