Martha Stewart Biography

Martha Stewart 's image as the personification of gracious living may lead some to imagine that she grew up in the sort of rural luxury pictured in her books and magazine. In fact, she was born in the industrial city of Jersey City, New Jersey, a location known more for heavy industry than for rustic charm. Her parents, Martha and Edward Kostyra, were a schoolteacher and a pharmaceuticals salesman, respectively. When Martha was three, the family moved to Nutley, New Jersey, where she grew up with four brothers and sisters in a close-knit Polish-American family defined by the father's intense ambition for his children. Edward Kostyra taught his daughter gardening when she was only three; her mother taught her cooking and baking and sewing; she learned still more about baking pies and cakes from an elderly couple -- retired bakers -- who lived next door.

Martha Kostyra was a hard-working, serious child. A straight A student, she won a partial scholarship to Barnard College in New York City and worked as a model to help pay expenses. She began her college career intending to study chemistry, but later switched to art, European history and architectural history. Just after her sophomore year, she married Andrew Stewart, a law student. After graduation, she continued a successful modeling career, doing television commercials for Breck, Clairol, Lifebuoy soap and Tareyton cigarettes. In 1965, her daughter was born, and Martha Stewart quit modelin