📍Washington Heights, Manhattan, New York, NY 10040, USA
1922 – 1939“I was born Stanley Martin Lieber in December 1922 in my parents' apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My parents, Jack and Celia, were Jewish immigrants from Romania. My father was a dress cutter, and when the Depression came he could hardly find work. In the early 1930s, with money short, we moved to a small apartment in Washington Heights, at the northern end of Manhattan, where I shared a bedroom with my younger brother, Larry, and watched my parents worry and argue about money. Books were my escape. I read everything I could find: Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Shakespeare and the pulp magazines, and I loved the films of Errol Flynn. I dreamed of becoming a writer. I was restless and ambitious, and I took every odd job going: delivering sandwiches, writing obituaries for a news service, ushering at a Broadway theatre and selling newspaper subscriptions. In my teens we moved to the Bronx, and I went to DeWitt Clinton High School, where a teacher showed me that humour was the best way to reach people. I graduated in 1939, at sixteen and a half, and through my cousin's husband, Martin Goodman, I got a job as an assistant at Timely Comics, filling inkwells and running errands. I used the pen name Stan Lee for my first story, saving my real name for the great novel I meant to write. Timely became Marvel, and in the 1960s, with artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, I helped create Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the Hulk: heroes with real problems, like the struggling New Yorkers I grew up among.”
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