Up the Hayloft Ladder: An Autobiography

In this work spanning eight decades, the author portrays in concrete detail the joys and rigors of his boyhood on a midwest farm in a byegone era, followed by ten professional years as a pastor which begin with enthusiasm and end in disillusionment. He gets a second chance at life when he and his family move to a Vermont hill farm and he becomes a professor of philosophy at Lyndon State College. A significant part of this renewal is the resolution of a midlife crisis, which the author casts into a Jungian framework replete with numerous dreams and climaxing in a kind of psychological and spiritual redemption. No narrow scholar, Dr. Vos shares his personal philosophy and interest in the history of ideas as well as his passion for activities which include maple sugaring, hunting, softball and collecting early American antiques.

Kenneth D. Vos was born in 1930 into a Dutch Calvinist environment and spent his youth as a Minnesota farm boy during the Great Depression. During the last 32 years of his professional life he taught Philosophy at Lyndon State College in Vermont. After his retirement in 1999 he was awarded the honor of Professor Emeritus. Like his favorite philosopher, William James, he is interested in the inner life of psychology and states of consciousness. He balances that introspective tendency with numerous physical activities and concerns about the external world of nature, politics, social justice and the history of ideas. He got his elementary education in two-room country schools and earned his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University. Dr. Vos lives with his wife, Frances, in an 1830 farmhouse in New England.