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The son of a gynecologist on Chicago's North Shore, Turow inherited ambition early: "I grew up with a very successful father, whose success I knew I'd be expected to emulate." His early years were spent in what he describes as "a nouveau-riche Jewish ghetto" filled with returned World War II veterans eager to get ahead; he recalls the "sense of identity" he got from that ethnic community and the loss he felt when, at age 13, his parents moved further north to the wealthy and Waspish suburb of Winnetka.
There he encountered what he remembers as "a quiet current of anti- Semitism" for the first time, another goad for him to excel. At New Trier high school, he began writing for the school newspaper and quickly determined that he had found his life's work -- one that promised glory at least equal to his father's, and on his own terms. "I told my parents," he says, "that I had abandoned their lifelong ambition for me to be a doctor. I was going to be a writer."
They were neither amused nor encouraging. "My mother wanted to protect me from the fabled anguish of the literary life. She said I could be a doctor and write on the side, like Chekhov and William Carlos Williams." No sale. At Amherst College in the hubbub of the counterculture '60s, Turow became more rebellious still. During his freshman year, he and 22 other students marched against Army recruiters on campus; all promptly lost their student draft deferments. Turow eventually received a 1-Y permanent deferment because of a chronic anemic condition.
On the academic front, Turow was a dedicated free spirit. "I wasn't a great student," he says. "I was nominally an English major. I was trying to figure out how to become a novelist. I wrote a lot, and I read a lot." He recalls "drinking in" Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet and being "overwhelmed by" Robert Stone's first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. He also fell under the influence of a visiting teacher, the short-story writer Tillie Olsen. "She took me seriously as a writer, and I'm enormously grateful."
While at Amherst, Turow had two stories accepted by the Transatlantic Review ; also, during a Christmas break back home, he had a blind date with Annette Weisberg, an art major at the University of Illinois and a near neighbor whom he had never met before. With graduation approaching, he was offered a fellowship to study creative writing at Stanford. "What was the alternative? A job!" So to the dismay of four parents, he and Annette set out for California.
Among other lessons, his four years at Stanford taught Turow the charms of the bourgeois life he thought he had rejected. "True student poverty," with its balancing of stipends, food stamps and unemployment benefits, he found difficult to take. "The only fight about money that Annette and I ever had was over a $6 pot she bought at an art auction." In addition, California life-styles in the early 1970s made Turow realize that he was more conventional than he had thought. "It was unbelievable," he remembers. "There was incessant drinking and substance abuse, and marriages were falling apart all over the place. Annette and I were newly married ((they made their union official in April 1971)), and we decided to stay married. In that sense, California was too crazy for us."