Judy Blume, born Judith Sussman, was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on February 12, 1938.
Judy Blume was born Judith Sussman on February 12, 1938, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Esther and Rudolph Sussman. She grew up in a middle-class Jewish American family, the second child after her older brother David.
From an early age, Blume was an avid reader and storyteller, often inventing tales inside her own head as a way of coping with a somewhat restrictive childhood environment. Her formative years in Elizabeth, New Jersey, would later heavily influence her fiction, most notably surfacing decades later in her adult novel In the Unlikely Event (2015), which was based on real 1950s plane crashes in her hometown.
Blume attended New York University, where she studied education, and it was there she began to seriously develop her writing craft while raising a young family. Though her birth itself was not a public event, it marks the starting point of a life that would go on to profoundly reshape children's and young adult literature. Her frank, empathetic voice would eventually give millions of young readers permission to discuss previously taboo subjects like puberty, sexuality, divorce, bullying, and religious identity.
Blume's birth in 1938 places her coming-of-age in the conservative postwar era, a context against which her later boundary-pushing works would stand in sharp, historically significant contrast.
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