... Thurman was a nervous, sickly child who loved to read and thought of himself as a writer when, at age ten, he wrote his first novel. A devout movie fan, he was impressed by the serials he probably saw at Saturday matinees and tried to write comparable Hollywood scenarios. His interest in film was to be a lasting one. His appetite for reading was never sated, but teachers were unable to influence his eclectic taste. He read the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare as well as the sonnets; he did not care for George Berkeley, David Hume, or Immanuel Kant, but he did care for Friedrich Nietzsche; he read and reread Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Charles Baudelaire, Charles Saint-Beuve, and Stendahl; he led himself through Herbert Spencer, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Hardy, Fyodor Dostoyevski, Havelock Ellis, and Sigmund Freud. In high school he dismissed the idea of a literary career but in college changed his mind again.
For a time in 1919 he was a helper at the Hotel Utah Cafe, the same year he enrolled at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Transferring to the University of Southern California, he entered a program to prepare for medical school and continued his studies until 1923. From neither of these institutions did he receive a degree. ...
