de Gaulle. In 1959, Pépin went to the United States to work at the restaurant Le Pavillon. Wanting to complete his education, he enrolled in English for foreign students, a GED equivalent and eventually General Studies classes toward a Bachelor of Arts degree at Columbia University. Soon after his arrival, The New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne introduced Pépin to James Beard and Helen McCully. McCully introduced Pépin to Julia Child, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator. In 1961, after Pépin had declined an offer from John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy to serve as chef at the White House, Howard Johnson, a regular Le Pavillon customer, hired him to work alongside fellow Frenchman Pierre Franey to develop food lines for his chain of Howard Johnson's restaurants, where Pépin served as the director of research and development for a decade. In 1970, Pépin earned his Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University's School of General Studies, and in 1972, his Masters of Arts in French literature from the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Pépin entered into a doctoral program at Columbia, but his proposed thesis on French food in literature was rejected for being "too frivolous for serious academic pursuit" (Pépin, para. 3). In 1970, Pépin opened a specialty soup restaurant and lunch counter on Manhattan's 5th Avenue called La Potagerie, and began to enjoy popular success with appearances on talk shows such as What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth. Pépin's career as a restaurant chef ended abruptly with a near fatal car accident in 1974. Middle career Beginning in the mid-1970s, Pépin reinvented himself as an educator, author and eventually a television personality. Pépin worked as a consultant for restaurateur Joe Baum on his Windows on the World project, and offered classes at small cooking schools and cookware shops around the United States. In 1976, Pépin authored his cookbook La Technique, followed by La Methode in 1979. The use of thousands of photographs, illustrating the techniques and methods required to achieve certain culinary results, provided a window into the art of cooking. The books are credited by chef Tom Colicchio and others as helping them to learn the craft of cooking. In 1982, along with Alain Saihlac and André Soltner, Pépin was invited by Dorothy Cann Hamilton to become one of the deans at the newly formed culinary school, the French Culinary Institute, in