Early Life and Banking Career
Robert Gordon Wasson was born on 22 September 1898 in Great Falls, Montana, the son of an Episcopalian minister, Edmund A. Wasson. He grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and studied at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Rather than pursuing a career in media, however, Wasson entered the financial industry. He joined J.P. Morgan & Company in 1934, where he pioneered the bank's public relations operations and rose to the position of vice president, a role he held from 1943 until his retirement in 1963.
Wasson's trajectory from Wall Street banker to the father of ethnomycology is one of the most improbable origin stories in the history of science. It began with a walk in the woods.
The Honeymoon Epiphany
In 1927, Wasson married Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, a Russian-born pediatrician. During their honeymoon in the Catskill Mountains of New York, they went for a walk and encountered a cluster of wild mushrooms. Valentina, drawing on her Russian heritage, immediately identified several edible species and gathered them enthusiastically. Wasson, raised in an Anglo-American culture that regarded virtually all wild mushrooms with suspicion and disgust, was horrified.
This clash of cultural attitudes sparked a shared obsession. The Wassons spent the next three decades investigating what Gordon came to call "mycophilia" and "mycophobia" -- the love and fear of fungi across human cultures. They gathered folklore, mythology, linguistic evidence, and ethnographic data from around the world, working in their spare time while maintaining their respective professional careers. This research culminated in Mushrooms, Russia and History (1957), a lavishly illustrated two-volume work published in a limited edition of 512 copies and now one of the most prized collector's items in mycological literature.
