Lax attended Columbia University in New York City, where he studied with the poet and critic Mark Van Doren. As a student there in the late 1930s, he worked on the college humor magazine, "Jester" with a classmate who became a close lifetime friend, Thomas Merton. Others on the "Jester" staff were Ed Rice, founder and editor of "Jubilee" magazine (to which all three men contributed in the 1950s and ¹60s) and Ad Reinhardt. In his biography, "The Seven Storey Mountain", Merton describes Lax at a meeting with other "Jester" staff: "Taller than them all, and more serious, with a long face, like a horse, and a great mane of black hair on top of it, Bob Lax meditated on some incomprehensible woe." Mark Van Doren has commented that "The woe, I now believe, was that Lax could not state his bliss; his love of the world and all things, all persons in it".