Peter Lynch was born on January 19, 1944 in Newton, Massachusetts. In 1951, when Lynch was seven, his father was diagnosed with cancer. He died three years later, and Lynch’s mother had to work to support the family. Lynch reports that from his early teens he worked as a caddy to help support the family. During Lynch’s time as a sophomore at Boston College, he used his savings to buy 100 shares of Flying Tiger Airlines at $8 per share. The stock would later rise to $80 per share, profits from which helped pay for his education.

In 1965, Lynch graduated from Boston College (BC) where he had studied history, psychology and philosophy. He later earned a Master of Business Administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968.

In 1966, Lynch was hired as an intern with Fidelity Investments partly because he had been caddying for Fidelity’s president, D. George Sullivan, (among others) at Brae Burn Country Club in Newton, Massachusetts. He initially covered the paper, chemical, and publishing industries, and when he returned after a two-year Army stint he was hired permanently in 1969. This time Lynch was charged with following the textiles, metals, mining, and chemicals industries, eventually becoming Fidelity’s director of research from 1974 to 1977.

Though he continues to work part time as vice chairman of Fidelity Management & Research Co., the investment adviser arm of Fidelity Investments, spending most of his time mentoring young analysts, Peter Lynch focuses a great deal of time on philanthropy. He said he views philanthropy as a form of investment. He said he prefers to give money to support ideas that he thinks can spread, such as First Night, the New Year’s Eve festival that began in Boston in 1976 and has inspired similar events in more than 200 other communities, and City Year, a community service program founded in Boston in 1988 that now operates in 29 cities across the U.S.

In 1977, Lynch was named head of the then-obscure Magellan Fund which had $18 million in assets. By the time Lynch resigned as a fund manager in 1990, the fund had grown to more than $14 billion in assets with more than 1,000 individual stock positions. Taking over when Magellan was a small fund, Lynch had no restrictions on what assets he could buy (other than laws, such as an SEC-enforced federal law that prohibits investment company funds that are registered as “diversified” from holding more than 5% of total portfolio assets in a single company at time of purchase ). He focused on individual companies rather than any overarching strategy, starting with large US companies and gradually shifting emphasis to smaller and international stocks.

From 1977 until 1990, the Magellan fund averaged a 29.2% annual return and as of 2003 had the best 20-year return of any mutual fund ever. Lynch achieved dollar successes in a range of stocks including (by order of profit achieved – source is Beating the Street): Fannie Mae, Ford, Philip Morris, MCI, Volvo, General Electric, General Public Utilities, Student Loan Marketing, Kemper, and Lowe’s.

The Lynch Foundation, valued at $125 million, gave away $8 million in 2013 and has made $80 million in grants since its inception. The Foundation supports education, religious organizations, cultural and historic organizations, and hospitals and medical research. The Lynch Foundation was one of the first major supporters of Teach For America, AmeriCares, and Partners In Health. Lynch was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1991.

Lynch married his wife, Carolyn Ann Hoff, and cofounded the Lynch Foundation. They had three daughters. She died in October 2015 due to complications of leukemia at age 69.