Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, and raised in Susquehana, Pennsylvania, where his father worked as a lawyer and his mother was a strong and intelligent housewife (Boeree). Skinner’s parents encouraged him in his schoolwork, and he was well read as a child (B. F. Skinner). B. F. was “an active, out-going boy who loved the outdoors and building things, and actually enjoyed school” (Boeree). He enjoyed literature and biology especially (B. F. Skinner). Skinner attended Hamil

ton College in New York State (R. W. Kentridge). “He didn’t fit in very well, not enjoying the fraternity parties or the football games. He wrote for school paper, including articles critical of the school, the faculty, and even Phi Beta Kappa! To top it off, he was an atheist – in a school that required daily chapel attendance” (Boeree). He continued to read widely and to pursue interests in literature and biology. He began to write a lot of fiction and poetry, and became known as an aspiring poet. After his junior year, he attended the Summer School of English at Breadloaf, where he met Robert Frost (B. F. Skinner). When he graduated, “he planned to spend a year writing a novel, but found that he had nothing to write about and suffered through what he would later refer to his ‘dark year’”.

B. F. never became the award winning novelist he originally dreamed of, but he does write a large amount of papers and books on behaviorism. He will be most remembered for Walden II, a book about a utopian society that is run on Skinner’s own operant principles. “He worked in the lab of an experimental biologist, and developed behavioral studies of rats. He loved building Rube Goldberg contraptions as a kid; he put that skill to use by designing boxes to automatically reward behavior, such as depressing a lever, pushing a button, and so on. His devices were such an improvement on the existing equipment, they've come to be known as Skinner boxes” (A Science Odyssey).

Dr. B. F. Skinner forged the theory of Behaviorism, “a school of psychology that rejects the unobservable and focuses on patterns of responses to external rewards and stimuli” (Skinner, B. F.). Skinner

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