Vivas, Eliseo

Eliseo Vivas was born of Venezuelan parents in Pamplona, Colombia, on July 13, 1901. With the advent of the Venezuelan dictator Castro in 1908, the Vivas family went on an extended exile, first to Curacao, then Paris, and eventually to New York in 1915. Vivas received his secondary education in Curacao and New York and then entered the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute's program in engineering. While there Vivas took a course with Joseph Wood Krutch and decided to change his major to the humanities, which led him to transfer to the University of Wisconsin in 1926, on a Zona Gale Scholarship. There he earned a B.A. (1928) in philosophy and a Ph.D. (1935) also in philosophy.

In 1928 Vivas married Sarah Cohen, and the couple had a daughter, Marta Elvia, early in 1933. Sarah died in 1940 after suffering for several years from cancer. Vivas married again, late in 1941, to Dorothy Gant.

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