Early Life
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of William and Mary Bryson. (In 2006 Bryson published The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a humorous account of his childhood years in Des Moines.) His mother was of Irish stock. He has an older brother, Michael and a sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth.
Bryson attended Drake University for two years before dropping out in 1972, deciding to instead backpack around Europe for four months. He returned to Europe the following year with a high school friend, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz. Some of his experiences from this trip were relived as flashbacks in Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, which documents a similar journey Bryson made twenty years later.
Read more about this topic: Bill Bryson
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“Is marijuana addictive? Yes, in the sense that most of the really pleasant things in life are worth endlessly repeating.”
—Richard Neville (b. 1941)