Judy Blume

American · born 1938

Born Judith Sussman on February 12, 1938, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the dentist Rudolph Sussman and Esther Sussman, she grew up devouring the books that filled the house and inventing stories in her head long before she wrote any down. When her older brother David fell ill with a kidney infection, the family spent two years in Miami Beach so he could recover. She graduated from Battin High School in 1956 and, after a bout of mononucleosis cut short a start at Boston University, finished a degree in early education at New York University in 1961. She married John Blume in 1959 and had two children, Randy and Larry, by 1963, writing children's stories in whatever hours a young household left her. Her first book, The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo, appeared in 1969, but it was Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (1970), narrated by an eleven-year-old negotiating periods, bras, and an unresolved religion, that found her true audience. Blubber, Deenie, and Then Again, Maybe I Won't followed in quick succession, and Forever... (1975), her frank account of a teenage couple's first sexual relationship, made her a fixture on censors' lists once the book-banning campaigns of 1980 gathered force. She divorced Blume in 1975, married and divorced the physicist Thomas Kitchens within two years, and in 1987 married the writer George Cooper, her husband still. In 1981 she founded the Kids Fund from the royalties of Letters to Judy, a collection drawn from the letters young readers sent her. The National Book Foundation gave her its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2004, its first time honoring a writer whose primary readers were children. She survived a breast cancer diagnosis in 2012, and in 2016 she and Cooper opened Books & Books at The Studios of Key West, where she works the floor most days. Her books have sold more than 82 million copies in 32 languages. She lives in Key West.