Biography of Jeannette Walls by Anna Quesenberry

Jeannette Walls is an American author born on April 21, 1960 in Phoenix, Arizona. She was raised by her mother and father, Rose Mary and Rex Walls. She has two sisters, Lori, the oldest, Maureen the youngest, and a younger brother named Brian. When Jeannette was growing up, the Walls family lived briefly in San Francisco, California and Battle Mountain, Nevada. Then they moved across the country to Rex’s home town of Welch, Virginia, where Jeannette attended high school. There, they lived in a dilapidated shack on Little Hobart Street. Her mother worked as a teacher and her father was unemployed aside from the occasional odd job. Although the family struggled financially and faced many hardships, they never sought government assistance. Growing up Jeannette and her family lived without amenities that a lot of people probably take for granted; such as plumbing, heating, clean clothes, and a kitchen stocked with food.

At the age of 17, Jeannette left Welch to live with her sister Lori in New York City, where she finished high school, and supported herself through college at Barnard University. She worked as a reporter for The Phoenix newspaper in Brooklyn, New York, then as a columnist for New York magazine, and her various works have been published in other publications, including Esquire and USA Today. She went on to write four books. She was married to Eric Goldberg in New York City in 1988 and the two later divorced in 1996. She married journalist and memoir author, John Taylor in 2002 and it was he who eventually encouraged Jeannette to tell her story after keeping her past a secret for all of her adult life up until that point. Her memoir The Glass Castle went on to become a best-seller and brought the author a lot of notoriety. She has since appeared on Oprah, CNN, and The Today Show to discuss her memoir. She and her husband John currently live on a farm in Virginia.

The information from this biography was pieced together from notes from Walls' memoir The Glass Castle, as well as the references listed below.

References

Walls, Jeannette, The Glass Castle: A Memoir, Scribner (New York City), 2005.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, Jeannette Walls Biography, N.D. http://www.notablebiographies.com/newsmakers2/2006-Ra-Z/Walls-Jeannette.html

New York Times Magazine, How Jeannette Walls Spins Good Stories Out of Bad Memories, May 24, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/how-jeannette-walls-spins-good-stories-out-of-bad-memories.html?_r=0