Stout very briefly describes his early childhood, then discusses his undergraduate eduction at the University of California, Berkeley, with Willis Lamb, Harrison Brown, and Ed Lingafelter, taking classes from William F. Giaugue; his work in adiabatic demagnetization; his two years of postdoctoral teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; his work during the war at Los Alamos, which he discusses at some length; and his post-war appointment to the Institute of the Study of Metals at the University of Chicago and later as a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry, where he worked in the low temperature laboratory with Earl Long and Lester Guttman. The account culminates in Stout becoming editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics.