Marijane Meaker was born on May 27, 1927 in Auburn, New York. The only daughter of Ellis and Ida Meaker. Her father owned Ivanhoe Foods, whose chief product was mayonnaise, and she often joked of the family monopoly, as her grandfather owned many of the local grocery stores. "I grew up always wanting to be a writer. My father was a mayonnaise manufacturer, with a strange habit, for a mayonnaise manufacturer, of reading everything from the Harvard Classics, to all of Dickens, Emerson, Poe, Thoreau, Kipling, and John O'Hara, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, all the Book-of-the-Month Club selections, plus magazines like Time, Life Look, and Fortune, and all the New York City newspapers, along with the local Auburn, New York Citizen Advertiser."¹

Meaker's father was not the only one who encouraged her interest in reading and writing. "So did English teachers ... and librarians who had to pull me out of...