Advice to My Son Analysis Essay Example

Peter Meinke is the author of the poem “Advice to My Son”. Meinke was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1932. He later moved to Mountain Lakes High School in New Jersey in 1944 where he graduated from. During his high school, his dream was to one day be an author, this was revealed through his high school yearbook, “'wants to be: writer; probably will be: cencored,'”( He soon went to college at Hamilton College and graduated in 1955. After, he enlisted into the army. In 1957, Peter Meinke married an artist, Jeanne Clark, and had four children: Perrie, Peter, Gretchen, and Timothy. He returned to his former high school and taught there four two years, before restarting his journey in college again as he started to attend the University of Michigan to receive his M.A. in Literature. He later began to teach at Hamline University from 1961 to 1966 while he finished his PhD in English Literature at the University of Minnesota.
In 1966, Peter Meinke’s family moved to St. Petersburg, Florida as he started teaching at Eckerd College, formerly known as Floridy Presbyterian College, as a director of the Writing Workshop. He worked this job for nearly twenty-seven years, before taking an early retirement in 1993. Before and after his retirement, he has a “writer-in- resident,” (http://www.petermeinke.com/) at Hamilton College, Davidson College, the University of Hawaii, the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, Wichita State University, and other schools. Meinke’s family did not stay in one place for too long, he and his family spend much of their time visiting other schools to teach, and traveling to different countries. In 1990, Meinke received the Robert A. Staub Distinguished Teacher Award by Eckerd College and was given a Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters for his long service as a teacher, mentor, and writer. In 2008, Eckerd College created the Peter Meinke Endowed Chair in Creative Writing in honor of Peter’s work for the school. Besides writing, teaching, and