Lloyd Alexander - Personal Life

Personal Life

Alexander was born in Philadelphia in 1924 and grew up in Drexel Hill, a western suburb. His father was a stockbroker and the family was much affected by the Great Depression. His parents read only newspapers but they did buy books "at the Salvation Army to fill up empty shelves." Lloyd was a reader of books: "Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many other were my dearest friends and greatest teachers. I loved all the world's mythologies; King Arthur was one of my heroes; ..."

By fifteen he had determined to be a writer. His parents found him a practical job as bank messenger, which inspired a satire that would become his first book published fifteen years later, And Let the Credit Go (1955). He graduated at age sixteen in 1940 from Upper Darby High School, where he was inducted into the school's Wall of Fame in 1995.

His parents placed him at Haverford College just down the road from home (although he left after one term). Years later he observed, "My parents never read a book. I never in all my life saw them sit down and read a book. So it was always a mystery to them – where do these books come from, and who actually writes them? And our son wants to go into a business like that?!!" He ignored their warnings and "lived to regret not listening".

Alexander judged that adventure, not college, was the best school for a writer, and that US Army participation in World War II was an opportunity. The army shipped him to Texas where he played the cymbals in band and the organ in chapel. He received combat intelligence training in Maryland, then in Wales, before late wartime deployment in western and southern borderlands of Germany that had been conquered. He rose to be a staff sergeant in intelligence and counterintelligence.

After the war Alexander attended the University of Paris, where he met Janine Denni. They were married in 1946 and soon moved back home (for Lloyd) to Philadelphia.

Alexander died on May 17, 2007, two weeks after the death of his wife of sixty-one years. He is buried at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill. His daughter, Madeleine Khalil, died in 1990.