Anne Hopkins Aitken

Who was Anne Hopkins Aitken?

Anne Arundel Hopkins Aitken was an American writer on Zen. Named Anna Stinchfield Hopkins when she was born in Cook County, Illinois on February 8, 1911, Anne told her husband, Robert Baker Aitken, that her name was later changed because Stinchfield did not provide positive numerology readings. Her mother, Marian Stinchfield Hopkins, was born in Detroit, Michigan, and was 25 when Anne was born. Her father, Lambert Arundel Hopkins, born in New Mexico, was a 29 year-old "railroad supply man" when she was born.

Anne spent the years 1929 to 1931 studying abroad as an undergraduate at Oxford University and graduated from Scripps College in Claremont, California, with a B.A. in English in 1932. She then pursued a master's degree in sociology, first at Stanford University in 1933, and later at Northwestern University. In addition to her Oxford years, she also lived in England from January to June, 1937. She traveled to Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, Italy, México, and much of South America before becoming a teacher and assistant director at Happy Valley School in 1949. There she met, and in 1957 married, English teacher Robert Aitken.