Oprah Winfrey

📍Kosciusko, Mississippi, USA

“Oprah Gail Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in January 1954, to a teenage single mother, and spent her first six years living with her grandmother, Hattie Mae Lee, on a farm without running water. The family was very poor, and she has said she sometimes wore dresses made from potato sacks. Her grandmother, a strict and religious woman, taught her to read before she started school, and she recited Bible verses in church from the age of three. At six she went to live with her mother in Milwaukee, a period she has described as unstable and in which she suffered abuse. At fourteen she moved to Nashville to live with her father, Vernon, whose discipline and emphasis on education turned her life around. She won a scholarship to Tennessee State University, began working in radio and television, and in 1984 took over a morning talk show in Chicago that became The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Sources: Kelley, K. Oprah: A Biography (2010), Crown Publishers; Winfrey, O. What I Know for Sure (2014), Flatiron Books; Illouz, E. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery (2003), Columbia University Press