Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 20 May 1912, to Roy Wood and Helen Stalker Sellars.  His father was a significant philosopher in his own right, a professor at the University of Michigan and a founder of American Critical Realism. Wilfrid’s childhood in Ann Arbor was interrupted for two years when he was 9: the family spent a year in New England, the summer at Oxford, and the subsequent year in Paris, where Wilfrid attended the Lycée Montaigne.  Returning to Ann Arbor, Sellars then attended the high school run by the University’s School of Education, where he particularly enjoyed mathematics.  Following his graduation in 1929, the family returned to Paris. Sellars entered the Lycée Louis le Grand, where philosophy was in the curriculum and Marxism was in the air.  Not having discussed philosophy previously with his father, he began in philosophy as a French Marxist, although his father’s influence soon took precedence. (For a partial account of their philosophical connections, see F. Gironi 2017, 2018.) He followed his year at the Lycée with six months in Munich, polishing his German.