Judy Blume

Judy Blume was born Judith Marcia Sussman on February 12, 1938, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and grew up in a Jewish household that she described as more cultural than religious. Her mother, Esther, was a homemaker, and her father, Rudolph, was a dentist. She had an older brother, David. During her childhood, she faced several hardships: her brother’s kidney infection prompted a one-year move to Miami Beach when she was in second grade, and three airplane crashes in Elizabeth in 1951 and 1952 killed 121 people—her father helped identify remains from those disasters. Blume later said she buried those memories until writing her 2015 novel *In the Unlikely Event*, which centers on the crashes. She was active in dance and piano as a child and often made up stories in her head, but she didn’t plan to become a writer, since middle-class white women of her era were expected to marry and have children.

After graduating from the all-girls Battin High School in 1956, she briefly attended Boston University but left after a mononucleosis diagnosis. She transferred to New York University, where she lived in a dormitory on Washington Square Park. Her father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1959, and a month later, on August 15, 1959, she married lawyer John M. Blume, whom she’d met through college friends. She earned a bachelor’s degree in early education from NYU in 1961. The couple lived in New York City before having children.

Blume started writing through NYU courses while her children were in preschool. After two years of rejections, she published her first book, *The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo*, in 1969, followed by *Iggie’s House* in 1970. Her third book, *Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.* (1970), became a breakthrough bestseller and established her as a leading voice in young adult literature. The 1970s were her most prolific decade, with 13 more books, including *Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing* (1972), *Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great* (1972), *Blubber* (1974), and *Forever* (1975)—the last of which she wrote after her 13-year-old daughter said she wanted a book where characters have sex and don’t die. Blume’s novels tackled family conflict, bullying, body image, and sexuality, and she said she wrote about these topics because they were what children needed to know and what she wondered about as a child.