Early Life
Jeannette Walls is a bright daughter of Rex Walls and Rose Mary Walls. She was born on 21st April in 1960, in Phoenix, Arizona, the U.S. Her parents lived an ordinary life. His father took electrician jobs and her mother was a teacher. Her parents are often in debt and the fear of creditors kept them in a constant move. This tragic financial situation and her parent’s irresponsible attitude stole the joys of her early days. Besides, she suffered a great loss during her early years; aged three, she burnt herself while cooking hotdogs followed by skin graft operations.
Education
Jeannette Walls started her educational journey from a high school of her community and after her junior year of high school, she moved to New York City to join her sister. There, she started working as a journalist for the newspaper, The Phoenix. She managed to complete her graduation with honors from Barnard College in 1984. Besides working at the Brooklyn newspaper, she also offered her commendable services to Esquire Magazine and New York Magazine. At MSNBC.com she was adored as a gossip columnist.
Personal Life
Jeannette Walls, a notable figure of the contemporary world married twice. First, she married Eric Goldberg in 1988 but the two failed to stay together for a long time and parted ways in 1996. Later, in 2002, she remarried John Taylor, her fellow journalist, and settled in Virginia.
Some Important Facts of Her Life
- Her masterpiece, The Glass Castle is being adapted into a film and was translated into twenty-two languages.
- The Glass Castle enjoyed the status of the bestseller on the New York Times list for a hundred weeks.
- Her best-seller book, The Glass Castle won the American Library Association’s Alex Award (2006), Christopher Award, and the Books for Better Living Award.
Her Career
Jeannette’s life was marred with a series of tragic incidents. She led a traumatic childhood and before started a reputable career she had enough to overcome everything. Surprisingly, all these obstacles could not impede her creative abilities. Rather, those fatal struggles and hardships shaped her life and enabled her to achieve her goals. She successfully pursued two careers in life; journalism and writing. Working with The Phoenix laid the foundation of her literary success. Later, his services for The New York Magazine, Esquire, and MSNBC.com paved the way for a successful life. Weaving humorous history about the gossips in the U.S, she published his first remarkable work, Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip. The book limelight the role gossips play in the US. Life, media, and politics. Later, her best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle published in 2005, which talks about the struggle and bliss of childhood. The book relates to her life and her dysfunctional family. The book was praised and was warmly received not only by the audience but also by the critics. On receiving such praise, she came up with her first novel, Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel in 2009 followed by another masterpiece, The Silver Star.
Her Style
After establishing her career as a writer, Jeannette brought notable changes in the world of literacy. She gained immense popularity on account of her distinct writing style and the power she evoked with her ideas. She expressed her ideas in her literary pieces adopting a unique and descriptive writing style. Marked with the perfect blend of logic, literary devices, complex structure, and diction, her masterpiece, The Glass Castle exhibits the emotional struggle of her early childhood along with the socio-economic turmoil to present the grim picture of her struggling life. The reoccurring themes strands in most of her poems are struggle, innocence, and hardships of life.
Some Important Works of Jeannette Walls
- Best Novels: Jeannette is an outstanding writer of the contemporary world. She produced two novels in her life so far such as; Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel and The Silver Star.
- Other Works: Besides writing novels, Jeannette produced, Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip and her memoir, The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls’s Impact on Future Literature
Jeannette Walls is a phenomenal woman with unique creative abilities. Her unique and literary qualities distinct writing approach won accolades from the readers. Her pioneering work influences many people and arenas with journalism, politics, and everyone across the globe who love to enjoy her marvelous literary pieces. She gave voice to the sufferings and troubles she faced during her life as well as the little joys she shared in her life. She expresses her emotions and ideas in her texts so well that today various imitates her style, considering her a role model for writing fiction.
Famous Quotes
- “One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. “You’d be destroying what makes it special,” she said. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.” (The Glass Castle)
- “The women I know with strong personalities, the ones who might have become generals or the heads of companies if they were men, become teachers. Teaching is a calling, too. And I’ve always thought that teachers in their way are holy–angels leading their flocks out of the darkness.” (Half Broke Horses)
- “Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he’d say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn’t even see the stars. We’d have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them.” (The Glass Castle)