Marijane Meaker - Early Life

Early Life

Marijane Agnes Meaker was born to Ida T. and Ellis R. Meaker (a mayonnaise manufacturer) in Auburn, New York, where she also spent her childhood. She mentions in an autobiography that Carson McCullers' book Member of the Wedding influenced her. In a 2006 interview, Meaker said of McCullers', "I was drawn to all McCullers’s books. She was an underdog-lover as I am. She was also this sensitive, intelligent writer whose words were lovely. I felt she was a champion of everyone who felt out-of-step with the world. I still feel that way." Meaker grew up in a house filled with books and was fascinated by the concept of writing and writers. She was particularly interested in the idea of a pseudonym, that one could invent a new name and a new personality with each name.

Meaker received an education from Stuart Hall School, a boarding school in Staunton, Virginia, after asking her parents to send her there when she heard that lesbian activity occurred frequently at boarding schools. She was kicked out of the boarding school, she explains: "I was an unruly, rebellious child - a troublemaker with low marks. I was suspended in my senior year for throwing darts at a dartboard decorated with the pictures of faculty members cut out of an old yearbook. My mother's pleas to the bishop (it was an Episcopal school) got me reinstated long enough to graduate." She began submitting stories to women's magazines as a junior in high school under the name Eric Rantham McKay and was soundly rejected.

She later attended Vermont Junior College in 1945 and the University of Missouri from 1946 to 1949 where she was a member of Alpha Delta Pi sorority. However, she was less interested in conforming to the rules of a sorority, and preferred to find friends who were also writers. She made frequent submissions to literary magazines and collected many rejection slips.

Meaker sold her first story to Ladies' Home Journal under the name Laura Winston for what she thought was $75 US, but what her roommates had to point out to her was $750.00 US.