Profiles of The Roxbury Latin School’s most distinguished alumni.

Roxbury Latin was founded in 1645 by John Eliot and is the oldest secondary school in continuous operation in North America. Now former headmaster F. Washington Jarvis celebrates the lives and careers of the school’s 28 most notable alumni.

The profiles include General Joseph Warren, patriot and among the first to fall at the Battle of Bunker Hill; George Lyman Kittredge, the legendary Harvard English professor, linguist, and folklorist; Arthur Vining Davis, the embattled chairman of Alcoa who, in 1957, was the third richest man in the world; Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., distinguished American landscape architect; Paul Dudley White, the acclaimed teacher and cardiologist at the MGH; James Bryant Conant, the first president of Harvard (1933-53) from a scientific background and a reformist agenda; Albert H. Gordon, indefatigable builder of Kidder Peabody and a Wall Street powerhouse, renowned for having walked from every major airport to its attendant city, competed in marathons well into his eighties, and remained chairman of the Trollope Society into his hundreds. Washington Jarvis, sympathetic but critical, articulate and lucid, fully brings each fascinating figure to life.