[3] In 1892, his great-uncle George Dorris purchased a farm in Springfield, about five miles from Eugene, and experimented with various crops before establishing a hazelnut orchard in 1905.
The mild weather, abundance of rain, and well-drained soil of the Willamette Valley provided ideal conditions for growing nut trees.
Afterward, he enrolled in the graduate school of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to pursue his studies in Restoration and eighteenth-century English literature.
He took his first teaching jobs while finishing his doctoral dissertation on poet, librettist, and translator Paolo Antonio Rolli (1687-1765) and the Italian circle in London.
[5] Before completing his dissertation, Dorris began his professional career as an instructor of English literature at Duke University in North Carolina (1957-1960).
After attending a performance of the New York City Ballet in February 1965, Dorris was fortunate to meet the poet Jack Anderson, who was working at Dance Magazine at the time.
His interest in dance history grew further after meeting Anderson, who, along with their friend George Jackson, also wrote for the English magazine Ballet Today.
In his academic field, Dorris had found that there was "not much new to say about John Dryden or Alexander Pope," but he came to realize that "there were enormous areas of dance just waiting to be discovered.
On February 12, 2015, in the company of friends and colleagues at their home in Greenwich Village in New York City, they celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their first meeting and lifetime union.