Judy Blume, née Judith Sussman, was born in 1938 in Elizabeth, New Jersey to a middle-class white Jewish family. During her childhood, she says she loved "making up stories inside her head." She attended Boston University briefly, but after a bout with illness, she transferred to New York University. While she was studying there, she married lawyer John Blume in 1959 and graduated with her bachelor's degree in education in 1961. She had two children, Randy and Lawrence, before she was 25 years old.
While raising her children, Blume took a writing course at NYU and began to explore writing for children. Her first children's novel, The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo, came out in...
