Early Life and Family
Biden was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the eldest son of former U.S. Senator and current Vice President Joe Biden, and his first wife, Neilia Hunter. His mother and younger sister, Naomi Christina Biden, were killed in an automobile accident in 1972, in which he and his brother Hunter were badly injured. He and his brother encouraged his father to remarry, and Jill Jacobs became Beau's stepmother in 1977. His half-sister Ashley was born in 1981.
He is a graduate of Archmere Academy, his father's high school alma mater, as well as the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity, and Syracuse University College of Law. From 1995 to 2004, he worked at the United States Department of Justice in Philadelphia, first he served as Counsel to the Office of Policy Development and later as a Federal Prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office. In 2004, he became a partner in the Wilmington law firm Bifferato, Gentilotti, Biden & Balick.
He and his wife, Hallie, have two children: a daughter, Natalie, and a son, Hunter.
At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, after Joe Biden was nominated for Vice President of the United States, Beau introduced his father. He recounted the auto accident that killed his mother and sister and the subsequent parenting commitment his father made to his sons, a speech at which many delegates wept.
Read more about this topic: Beau Biden
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)