One oddity of the very odd US educational system is that top universities try to diversify their student populations in countless ways, including applicants’ locations. That’s not necessarily strange at all, except that in practice, if you’re a mediocre high school student from Wyoming, the least populated US state, you have a far better chance of acceptance at any of the top schools than does an excellent student from New York, California, or any of the more populated states.
That’s what happened to John Perry Barlow, who was born October 3, 1947 in Wyoming. He grew up on a ranch and attended a one-room schoolhouse, but was an average student at best. Nevertheless, he was accepted at Wesleyan University. He was elected president of the student body, but that ended when he entered a sanitarium after a mental health crisis when he was about 20.
In his senior year, he began spending time in New York City and became part of Andy Warhol’s Factory. His Wyoming origins may have helped him again when he was admitted to Harvard Law School. At the same time, a publisher gave him a multi-thousand-dollar advance to write a novel — it’s unclear why, because there’s no evidence he’d written anything of note before that. Instead of law school or writing, though, he took his advance and traveled for two years, including stays in India, Long Island, New York, and Los Angeles. He eventually did start writing and finished the novel, but nobody (including the publisher who’d paid him the advance) would publish it.
Another adventure during his college years involved frequent visits to Timothy Leary’s research lab in New York, where he claimed to have taken LSD over 1000 times. This may have prompted his interest in The Grateful Dead band, which he was close to because he’d known Bob Weir (a co-founder of the band) as a boy. He started writing lyrics for some of their songs, including Cassidy, Mexicali Blues, and Black-Throated Wind. Cassidy, by the way, is about Neal Cassaday, who was a well known Beat Generation personality, famous mostly for being a character in Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road.
During the 1970s, while he was writing Grateful Dead lyrics, he also started writing movie and TV scripts from his family’s ranch, which he returned to in order to help out after his father passed away. But then the personal computer arrived, and Barlow started writing about those devices and their effects. When the Internet came along, his writing went into high gear, and he published pieces in Wired, the New York Times, and more. He coined the phrase “electronic frontier,” and co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Starting in the 1990s, Barlow became a traveling lecturer, speaking extensively about human rights, freedom of speech, and the effects of the Internet on society. For all that, though, he claimed to be a lifelong member of the conservative Republican party. But was also an environmentalist. You can delve deeper into the countless contradictions of John Perry Barlow in his memoir, Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times. It was published postumously in 2018.
