The Rev. Albert Jay Nock, Ph. D.

Albert Jay Nock was born October 13, 1870, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was the only child of Emma Sheldon Jay, who descended from French Protestants, and Joseph Albert Nock, a hot-tempered steelworker and Episcopal clergyman. Nock grew up in a semi rural Brooklyn, New York neighborhood, and the family had a large garden and fruit trees. According to his account, he learned the alphabet by puzzling over a newspaper and asking questions. He didn't attend school until he was a teenager, but at home books, which he explored randomly, surrounded him. He recalled that the first book he focused on was Webster's Dictionary, probably because it was a fat book on a lower shelf. "The dictionary became quite literally my bosom friend, for I lugged it about, clasped it to my breast with both hands, from one place to another where I should not be underfoot, and there I would lay it open on the floor and read it." After attending a private preparatory school, Nock entered St. Stephen's College (later to become Bard College) in 1887. It had fewer than one hundred students. Both institutions stressed a classical curriculum, and Nock relished Greek and Latin literature. He graduated third in his ten-student class. Nock went on to attend Berkeley Divinity School, Middletown, Connecticut, and although he left after about a year, he was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1897. The following year, he began serving as assistant rector at St. James Church. He succeeded the rector, Rev. Henry Purdon.

It was in Titusville that Nock met Agnes Grumbine, and they were married April 25, 1900. They had two sons: Samuel Albert, born in 1901, and Francis Jay, born in 1905. Nock left his wife soon thereafter, and never remarried. His sons grew up to become college teachers. Meanwhile, Nock was called to Christ Episcopal Church, Blacksburg, Virginia, and then to St. Joseph's Church in Detroit.

It was during Dr. Nock's rectorship that the choir was first vested, the Women's Auxiliary reorganized, St. James Guild formed, and the Willing Workers started their helpful work for the aged and infirmed clergy of the church.

In 1909, he seemed to have experienced a crisis of faith. "My life was detached, untouched and colorless," he later told Ruth Robinson. Nock embraced ideas of crusading economic reformer Henry George. George's philosophy was the philosophy of human freedom, he believed that all mankind are indefinitely improvable, and that the freer they are, the more they will improve.

Nock quit the clergy to become an editor of American Magazine, launched by editors and writers who had a falling out with S.S. McClure, the pioneering muckraking publisher. Nock worked at American Magazine for four years. He wrote articles advocating a single tax on land and he approved Canada's policy of having government own vast acreage. He befriended the former Toledo mayor and aspiring scholar Brand Whitlock, who later wrote a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette. He spent time with the likes of muckraking journalists Lincoln Steffens and John Reed. He honed his writing. "My stuff is good enough, perhaps, and surely better than five or six years ago, but it still sounds as though it was written from a seat in the grand stand." he wrote Ruth Robinson.

Two years before he died, Dr. Nock's autobiography " Memoirs of a Superfluous Man" was published. In the preface, he wrote, "Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me." Indeed, he was a private man.

Albert Jay Nock passed away on August 19, 1945 at the home of Ruth Robinson in Wakefield Rhode Island. He was laid to rest at Riverside Cemetary in Wakefield, R.I.