“Epitome of America”

Rollo May was born and raised in what once was considered the American heartland, the small-town Protestant Midwest. However, his family life was extremely troubled. His father was a YMCA field secretary and his mother a devout Methodist who had a stormy and ultimately dysfunctional family life. Rollo sought escape in nature and tried to fulfil especially his mother’s sense of her son’s destiny. He was shy, resentful of his family’s relative poverty, and felt caught between the battles his father and mother constantly waged. Still, he saw his future in “religious work” and being a “friend to man.”