E. Digby Baltzell

Edward Digby Baltzell Jr. (November 14, 1915 – August 17, 1996) was an American sociologist, academic and author. He studied the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment and is credited with popularizing the acronym WASP. His maternal grandfather was Rev. Dr. H. Louis Duhring of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia.

He attended St. Paul's School, an Episcopal boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, graduating in 1935. Unable to afford Harvard or Yale or Princeton, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, paying for his tuition with a scholarship and worked at Franklin Field where he collected tickets, ushered, and parked cars.

In the summer of 1937, he worked at the Northeast Harbor Tennis Club and its swimming club in Mount Desert Island, Maine, arranging tournaments and other activities at both clubs. A friend loaned him $200 to return to Penn, and he graduated with a B.S. from the Wharton School of Business in 1939. During World War II, he joined the U.S. Navy, serving as a naval aviator and air combat intelligence officer in the Pacific theater. He belonged to the American Sociology Association, the American Studies Association, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 1989: Honorary Degree, University of Pennsylvania 1985: Ira Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania 1979: Athenaeum Literary Award, Athenaeum of Philadelphia – for Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia

Personal life Baltzell married the artist and debutante Jane Gibson Piper in 1943. She was the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Edmund B. Piper of Philadelphia. They had two daughters, Eve and Jan Baltzell. She died in 1991. He married his second wife, Jocelyn Carlson, in 1993.

He lived on Delancey Place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and had a summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. An expert on the history of social register clubs, he chose to be a member of only one, The Franklin Inn Club in Philadelphia. He said, I never belonged to any club, because they're all anti-Semitic, except one. I used to belong to the Franklin Inn Club for intellectuals."

In 1996, he died of a heart attack at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston at the age of 80 years.