ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Howard Wriggins, the Bryce Professor of International Relations, Emeritus, of Columbia University in the City of New York, grew up in Philadelphia where he attended the Germantown Friends School. The Quaker values he learned there and at the Friends Meeting he attended played an important role in his choosing to declare himself a conscientious objector at the beginning of World War II.

Once he had graduated from Dartmouth College, he began graduate work at the University of Chicago. His study of political science there was interrupted by a call from the American Friends Service Committee to join their relief operation in Europe at the height of World War II.

Young Wriggins, an idealistic 23-year-old, moved around the Mediterranean area, from Portugal to North Africa to Italy to France as a relief administrator for the next four years. The letters he wrote home at that time form the basis for the memoir he has prepared, Picking Up The Pieces From Portugal To Palestine: Quaker Relief in the Mediterranean.

(Howard Wriggins in Paris - 1945)

(Howard Wriggins and Art Greenleigh
of the JDC - Italy)

Returning to the United States after the war, he resumed his studies, this time at Yale, only to be called by the Quakers again, this time to Gaza where the Palestinian refugees were being sheltered after the creation of Israel. He spent the next year observing, feeding, housing and educating hundreds of thousands of refugees there.

These two experiences, one during the war, the other immediately after it, informed Wriggins’s lifelong concern with the interactions of governmental, military and charitable agencies. His work as a political scientist brought him to the Library of Congress and the National Security Council in Washington DC; to the US Ambassadorship to Sri Lanka under Jimmy Carter; and finally to a distinguished career as a scholar and teacher at Columbia University.

Today Professor Wriggins lives with his wife, Sally Hovey Wriggins, an expert on medieval Buddhism, in Hanover, New Hampshire. He is an accomplished photographer and sailor.