Born Virginia Cleo Andrews in Portsmouth, Virginia, the third child and first daughter to William Henry, a tool and dye maker, and Lillian Lilnora Parker, a telephone operator. "I was brought up in a working-class environment, with a father who loved to read as much as I did. When I was seven he took me to the public library and signed me up for my first library card. He went home with two books. I went home with nine.
"Books opened doors I hadn't even realized were there. They took me up and out of myself, back into the past, forward into the future; put me on the moon, placed me in palaces, in jungles, everywhere. When finally I did reach London and Paris--I'd been there before."1
"I loved Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe ... moody books, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy, books with atmosphere; Russian novels with rain and stormy weather."2
"I never had the conscious thought of wanting to escape into another world; it's just that I didn't see fairies dancing on the lawn, I didn't see giants and witches, and I wanted to."3
Although Andrew's father was an avid reader, the family kept only three books in their home.
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