They claim everybody was born, but I don’t recall. Maybe I was having one of my blackouts.
—James Douglas Morrison
James Douglas Morrison was born on December 8th 1943 in Melbourne, FL as the eldest of three children. His sister Anne and brother Andy were born in 1946 and 1949. His mother Clara (née Clarke) rose the three children nearly alone while Jim’s father Steve was in the US Navy and busy with his careerHe became at the age of 47 the youngest US Navy Admiral and the young family had to move a lot. This mobility had a major impact for his later poetry. There’s The Hitchhiker, a traveler or the various poems about crossroads and highways and his movie HWY are showing this mobility. Over the years the Morrisons lived in Clearwater FL, twice in Albuquerque NM and Washington DC, Claremont CA (near Los Angeles), Alameda CA1, and Alexandria VA. In Alexandria Jim graduated high-school, with a score 30% above the national average in verbals, he made a 88.32 average in grades with only basic effort. But more interesting, in his high school years he read Nietzsche, PlutarchAfter reading Lives of the Noble Greeks Jim supposedly started to imitate the look of Alexander the Great, RimbaudA major influence for the style of Jim’s short prose poems, Jack KerouacMost famous beatnik author who wrote. On The Road. Jim read it in 1958, Allen Ginsberg2 and Michael McClure3. After finishing high-school and a year at the St. Petersburg Junior College, he enrolled at the Florida State University. In his second trimester he took two influential courses, one on the philosophies of protest, which included Montaigne, Rousseau, Hume, Sartre and of course Nietzsche, the other course was on collective behavior which later showed useful when he provoked riots at Doors concerts.
1 Near San Francisco and the center of the early Beat-movement in the 50s
2 Famous for his poem Howl which he first performed at Six Gallery in San Fransisco
3 Who later became a good friend of Jim and planned a film with Jim playing the main-role