Louise Glück was born in New York City, New York, United States.
Louise Elisabeth Glück was born on April 22, 1943, in New York City, into a family of Hungarian Jewish descent. Her father, Daniel Glück, was a businessman who co-invented the X-Acto knife, and her mother, Beatrice, was a homemaker who encouraged her daughters' intellectual pursuits. The family later moved to Long Island, where Glück grew up in a household that prized literature and classical mythology, subjects that would become central to her later poetic work.
As a teenager, Glück struggled with anorexia nervosa, an experience that led her to leave high school before graduating and enter psychoanalysis for several years, a process she later credited with teaching her to think critically and precisely—skills that shaped her spare, exacting poetic style.
She never completed a traditional undergraduate degree, instead attending Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University as a special student, studying poetry under Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. This unconventional education set the stage for one of the most significant literary careers in American letters, culminating decades later in the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her birth marks the beginning of a life that would fundamentally reshape confessional and mythic modes in American poetry.
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