Ralph Kirkpatrick was born on June 10, 1911, in North Leominster, Massachusetts, into an academic family. His father, Edwin Asbury Kirkpatrick, taught psychology. He can be seen, along with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, in the famous 1909 photograph of the participants in a Clark University psychology conference that brought Freud to the United States for the first time. Ralph was the youngest of four children and had two sisters and a brother. His mother, who was his first piano teacher, died in 1927, and his father remarried the following year. Ralph was close to his stepmother. When he traveled to Europe for the first time in 1931, he sent letters to his father and stepmother that were then circulated within the family. He wrote almost every week, and it was clearly very important to him to hear from them. He asked the family to keep the letters he wrote as a record of his experiences in Europe studying with Landowska, Boulanger, and others.

He used a number of these letters in his memoir Early Years, and I have chosen to include some of them here. Other letters included are from my own collection, as well as from the collection of Kirkpatrick papers at the Yale University Music Library. Since the letters to the family were transcribed and typed by his stepmother for distribution within the family, I can't be certain whether the punctuation and spelling are RK's.

September 23, 1931

Dear Family,

… In New York in the Museum of Modern Art, I managed to run into half a dozen acquaintances in half an hour, in an amazing way. I went to see Miss Van Buren, who gave me much valuable advice concerning Dolmetsch and Landowska. She also told me that Harold Bauer was to be in Paris until January. If I can manage it, I am going to study with him.