Haskell was born in Phillipopolis, now
Plovdiv, Bulgaria. His mother was a Swiss
missionary, Elisabeth Fröhlich, who married an American missionary, Edward Bell Haskell, who himself was born in Bulgaria of American missionary parents. During his childhood, the family traveled widely throughout Europe (as a result he learned to speak six languages), before returning to the
United States. Haskell attended
Oberlin College in 1929, where he met
Willard Quine who became a lifelong friend. After obtaining his B.A. in 1929, Haskell did a year of graduate studies at
Columbia University. While hitchhiking during his days as an Oberlin student, Haskell met two wealthy sisters named Reynolds; they were from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. He so impressed them with his ideas and originality that they set up a
trust fund to help support him. This situation appears to have led Haskell to disdain pursuing his research within the context of conventional employment. He lived most of his life alone in a cramped and cluttered student apartment near Columbia University, purchased for him by his half-brother
Douglass Haskell and sister-in-law Helen Haskell. Haskell maintained close relations with both his full and half brothers and sisters throughout his life. Married twice, he had no children of his own. Haskell employed the leisure afforded him by his good fortune to travel and write a book,
Lance—A Novel about Multicultural Men (published in 1941) before resuming his graduate studies, this time at
Harvard University and the
University of Chicago. Although he became a Fellow at University of Chicago in 1940, he never completed his thesis and was not awarded the Ph.D. He left Chicago to teach
sociology and
anthropology at the
University of Denver and
Brooklyn College. In 1948, he left teaching to devote himself full-time to private research. Haskell established the Council for Unified Research and Education (C.U.R.E., Inc.) in 1948, a non-profit research organization for the unification of
science and
education, which he ran until it was dissolved in the mid-1980s. Among its members were
Harold Cassidy,
Willard Quine,
Arthur Jensen, and Jere Clark. CURE's goal was the synthesis of all knowledge into a single discipline, and they established a body of work called "
The Unified Science". Haskell was the guiding light of CURE, and the originator of most of its seminal concepts. In 1972, Haskell published his
Full Circle—The Moral Force of Unified Science. This book has been out of print for many years, but is now available online, gratis. The greater part of Haskell's work on Unified Science work remains unpublished. Throughout his life, Haskell taught short courses and seminars on Unified Science at Columbia University,
West Virginia University,
Southern Connecticut State College,
Drew University, and the
New School for Social Research. Haskell died shortly after suffering an incapacitating
stroke in 1990. == Work ==