(including ambulance driver, engineering aide, salesman and medical orderly) and absorbed various philosophers and cultural practices (including bebop, psychoanalysis, Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Leon Trotsky and Ayn Rand, whom he later repudiated) while writing in his spare time. He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute from 1952 to 1957 and English education at New York University from 1957 to 1958 but failed to take a degree from either institution. After having smoked marijuana for nearly a decade, Wilson first experimented with mescaline in Yellow Springs, Ohio, on December 28, 1961. Wilson began to work as a freelance journalist and advertising copywriter in the late 1950s. He adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Anton, for his writings and told himself that he would save the "Edward" for when he wrote the Great American Novel. He later found that "Robert Anton Wilson" had become an established identity. He assumed co-editorship of the School for Living's Brookville, Ohio-based Balanced Living magazine in 1962 and briefly returned to New York as associate editor of Ralph Ginzburg's quarterly, fact:, before leaving for Playboy, where he served as an associate editor from 1965 to 1971. According to Wilson, Playboy "paid me a higher salary than any other magazine at which I had worked and never expected me to become a conformist or sell my soul in return. I enjoyed my years in the Bunny Empire. I only resigned when I reached 40 and felt I could not live with myself if I didn't make an effort to write full-time at last." Along with frequent collaborator Robert Shea, Wilson edited the magazine's Playboy Forum, a letters section consisting of responses to the Playboy Philosophy editorial column. During this period, he covered Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert's Millbrook, New York-based Castalia Foundation at the instigation of Alan Watts in The Realist, cultivated important friendships with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and lectured at the Free University of New York on 'Anarchist and Synergetic Politics' in 1965. He received a BA, MA (1978) and PhD (1981) in psychology from Paideia University, which was an accredited university in California at the time he graduated in 1981 but later on became unaccredited and then closed. Wilson reworked his dissertation, and it found publication in 1983 as Prometheus Rising. Wilson married freelance writer and poet Arlen Riley in 1958. They had four children, including Christina Wilson