James (“Jim”) McGill Buchanan was born in rural Tennessee on October 3rd, 1919. Although not hardscrabble poor, the Buchanans were, as Jim described his family, “middle-class poor.” After spending his early academic years as a faculty member at various American universities, Buchanan moved with his colleague Gordon Tullock to Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. While at Virginia Tech, Buchanan, Tullock, and Charles Goetz, a former student of theirs, founded the Center for Study of Public Choice. Nearly all of James Buchanan’s work—from the late 1940s until his death in 2013—was motivated by his desire to understand human decision-making in government and other “collective decision-making” settings. His entire career can be seen as a constructive scholarly reaction to the analytical errors of Keynesianism on the one hand, and excessively romantic beliefs about democracy on the other. Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986. He continued to conduct seminars for graduate students for several years afterward and continued to be a regular presence on campus until the very end. He died on January 9th, 2013, at the age of 93.