Chambers was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,[3] and spent his infancy in Brooklyn. His family moved to Lynbrook, Long Island, New York State, in 1904, where he grew up and attended school.[2][4] His parents were Jay Chambers and Laha Whittaker. He described his childhood as troubled because of his parents' separation and their need to care for their mentally-ill grandmother. His father was an artist and member of the Decorative Designers; his mother was last a social worker. Chambers's brother, Richard Godfrey Chambers committed suicide shortly after he had withdrawn from college at age 22.[5] Chambers cited his brother's fate as one of many reasons that he was then drawn to communism. As he wrote, it "offered me what nothing else in the dying world had power to offer at the same intensity, faith and a vision, something for which to live and something for which to die."[1]
Education
After graduating from South Side High School in neighboring Rockville Centre in 1919, Chambers worked itinerantly in Washington and New Orleans, briefly attended Williams College and then enrolled as a day student at Columbia College of Columbia University.[1] At Columbia, his undergraduate peers included Meyer Schapiro, Frank S. Hogan, Herbert Solow, Louis Zukofsky, Arthur F. Burns, Clifton Fadiman, Elliott V. Bell, John Gassner, Lionel Trilling (who later fictionalized him as a main character in his novel The Middle of the Journey),[6] Guy Endore, and City College student poet Henry Zolinsky.[2] In the intellectual environment of Columbia, he gained friends and respect. His professors and fellow students found him a talented writer and believed he might become a major poet or novelist.[7]
In his sophomore year, Chambers joined the Boar's Head Society[8] and wrote a play called A Play for Puppets for Columbia's literary magazine The Morningside, which he edited. The work was deemed blasphemous by many students and administrators, and the controversy spread to New York City newspapers. Later, the play would be used against Chambers during his testimony against Hiss. Disheartened over the controversy, Chambers left Columbia in 1925.[1] From Columbia, Chambers also knew Isaiah Oggins, who went into the Soviet underground a few years earlier; Chambers's wife, Esther Shemitz Chambers, knew Oggins's wife, Nerma Berman Oggins, from the Rand School of Social Science, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and The World Tomorrow.[9]
Communism espionage
In 1924, Chambers read Vladimir Lenin's Soviets at Work and was deeply affected by it. He now saw the dysfunctional nature of his family, he would write, as "in miniature the whole crisis of the middle class", a malaise from which communism promised liberation. Chambers's biographer Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Lenin's authoritarianism was "precisely what attracts Chambers. ... He had at last found his church." Chambers became a Marxist and, in 1925, joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), then known as the Workers Party of America.
