Robert M Pennoyer Author

Robert M. Pennoyer attended St. Paul's School and Harvard College. During World War II he saw action in the Pacific as a young Naval officer. After graduation from Columbia Law School, he became, successively, a Federal prosecutor, and a counsel in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the Eisenhower years. In 1958 he returned to private practice in New York, joining a small firm, Patterson Belknap & Webb, which he helped to build into one of the leading firms in the country. For many years he served as counsel to the Rockefeller foundation. Committed to public service, Pennoyer founded a halfway house for men emerging from prison, and over the years served as a trustee of Columbia University, Union Theological Seminary, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and, for half a century each, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library. In the 1970s, under his leadership as president, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation established, at the suggestion of his poet wife, Victoria Parsons Pennoyer, the prestigious Whiting Writers' Awards. He lives on Manhattan's Upper East Side and, at the age of 90, still goes to the office every day.