Free Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant

straightforward five-word conclusion: “Happiness is love. Full stop.” Virgil, of course, needed only three words to say the same thing, and he said them a very long time ago—
Omnia vincit amor,
love conquers all—but unfortunately he had no data to back them up. 5
    A fifth lesson, to be expanded in Chapter 4 , is that what goes right is more important than what goes wrong, and that it is the quality of a child’s total experience, not any particular trauma or any particular relationship, that exerts the clearest influence on adult psychopathology. Consider Camille’s “year in the sack.” Let me repeat myself: what goes right is more important than what goes wrong.
    A sixth lesson is that if you follow lives long enough, they change, and so do the factors that affect healthy adjustment. Our journeys through this world are filled with discontinuities. Nobody in the Study was doomed at the outset, but nobody had it made, either. Inheritingthe genes for alcoholism can turn the most otherwise blessed golden boy into a trainwreck ( Chapter 9 ). Conversely, an encounter with a very dangerous disease liberated the pitiful young Dr. Camille from a life of dependency and loneliness.
    The final lesson is that prospective studies really do elucidate life’s mysteries. I’ve given only a tantalizing taste of this lesson in Chapter 10 , because it really does involve mysteries, and we are a long way from solving them in full. Yet it is likely that when they
are
solved, it will be with the help of lifetime studies like this one. The Grant Study has given us seventy-five years of real behaviors—not just trues and falses, not just A, B, C, D, or none-of-the-aboves—on which notions old and new about a rewarding life can be tested, retested, and refined.
    Even as they first set out, the originators of the Grant Study were beginning to gather exactly the evidence that contrarians like me would need to disagree with them. I inherited an orchard planted and nurtured with great care by a group of dedicated gardeners. For forty years I harvested its yield and took it to market. And since it is on follow-up that our theories stand or fall, my successors will continue the harvest when I no longer can. But credit for the fruit goes back to Arlie Bock, Clark Heath, and Lewise Gregory Davies who gave it the place and the time to grow, and to Charles McArthur who fertilized and pruned it once they had hung up their trowels. The creation of the Study is a life story all its own, and in the next chapter I will tell it.

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    A SHORT HISTORY OF THE GRANT STUDY
    The sign on the door read “The Grant Study of Adult Development.” Financed by W. T. Grant, the department store magnate, and run by Harvard’s Health Services Department, the study proposed to investigate “normal” young men, whatever that might mean.
    On that particular afternoon, I was a sophomore, just turned nineteen. The Depression and a six-month siege of polio had been the sole departures from an otherwise contented, if not stimulating, life.
    —BENJAMIN BRADLEE,
A Good Life,
1995
    In this chapter, i record the Grant Study’s seventy-five-year history for posterity—to be pondered, skimmed, or skipped at the reader’s pleasure. It’s the story not only of the Study, but also of seventy-five years of social sciences in America and the worldviews that came and went over that period. The research program of the Grant Study was directed by Clark Heath, M.D., from 1938 until 1954, by Charles McArthur, Ph.D., from 1954 to 1972, and from 1972 until 2004 by me. Since 2005, Robert Waldinger, M.D., has been the director of the Study.
    In the academic year 1936–1937, Arlen V. Bock, M.D., became Oliver Professor of Hygiene at Harvard and chief of the student health services. In a report to President James Conant, he proposed broadening the scope of the Department of Hygiene and the role of the college physician. As a first step, he suggested a scientific study of healthy