Joseph Hoffman was born the son of Adam and Josephine Biel Hoffman on August 4, 1850, in Sulzback, Bavaria. He emigrated to the United States and entered the Novitiate at New York in 1867, at the age of seventeen, where he received the robe and the religious name of Brother Arian. He taught in schools in the east for two years, until 1871 when he was assigned to Christian Brothers College in St. Louis, Missouri. He contracted tuberculosis and died at age twenty-one, having been a De La Salle Christian Brother for only four years.
