Holt was born in Winchester, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard in 1896 and received his Ph.D., also from Harvard, in 1901. His mentors at Harvard were William James, Hugo Münsterberg, and Josiah Royce. Holt retired from teaching at Harvard in 1918. Kuklick has suggested that Holt's retirement from Harvard was due to various causes. First, Holt shared William James' concerns and criticisms of academia, and resented the fact that academiclife had by his time turned into a quest for personal glory and prestige, rather than an honest quest for knowledge. Second, members of his intellectual group of friends, which included Robert Yerkes, Herbert Langfeld, and Ralph Barton Perry, left Cambridge or withdrew for familial reasons. Heft has also suggested that Holt's homosexuality might have generated some further conflicts in Cambridge in the early decades of the 20th century. Finally, Kuklick argued that Holt had assumed the care of his aging mother, which decreased his social interactions, and was likely the reason why Holt turned down an academic offer from the University of Manchester. Holt quit Harvard immediately after her death. His doctoral dissertation was in the area of perception, under the direction of Münsterberg. Around 1910 he started with others the philosophical movement of new realism, as a response to Royce's criticisms of William James' views on realism. After attending Sigmund Freud's famous lecture in Clark University in 1909, Holt was highly impressed with psychoanalysis, which influenced his book The Freudian Wish. His most famous work was published in 1931, Animal Drive and the Learning Process: An Essay Toward Radical Empiricism, which presented his views on learning and development. Holt's psychology was related to the behaviorism of Watson, but his views about behavior were broader and more philosophically oriented than Watson's, including for instance notions such as goals, purposes, and plans, clearly observable in the actions of organisms. For Holt, then, behavior is purposive and goal directed, a notion that influenced directly the theorizing of one of Holt's most famous students, Edward C. Tolman, who later emphasized many of Holt's points through his own work on purposive behavior. After his retirement, Holt moved to Tenants Harbor, Maine, with his long-time male companion, George X. Bernier. Holt came out of retirement and taught at Princeton for a decade between 1926 and 1936, before returning to Maine. Holt died in Rockland, Maine, in 1946, and is buried in Winchester, Massachusetts.
