He attended the horsey, orange-blossom redolent Thacher School in Ojai, California, followed by a year at Deep Springs College.

One of his favorite Yale philosophy professor, Wilbur Marshall Urban, was assigned and graded the papers that the recovering patient was authoring on the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, and others.

"What the country needs most in meeting the internal Communist threat is inquiry that lives up to reasonable standards," Davenport wrote in an article titled, "Little Man, What Now?

“Admittedly," wrote Davenport of the apartheid government of South Africa, "the color bar is an offensive and clumsy way to limit the follies of doctrinaire democracy.

In a Fortune article entitled "Beaches of the Mind,"[8] Davenport wrote about mental illness and then-current scientific thinking about treatment.

Marie Davenport was a founding member of CCCPA, today known as Triple C Housing, an organization to support transitional programs for the mentally ill.[9] In recalling Davenport, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote: "He was a graduate of Yale and was always rather distinctively Old Blue, combining random characteristics of that institution: social conventionality, crew cut, bookishness, a quiet self-assurance, a reliable sense of humor.