Julia Child Facts
Known for: popularizing French cooking and gourmet cooking in America, writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking (with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle)
Occupation: cookbook author, television personality
Dates: August 15, 1912 - August 12, 2004
Also known as: Julia McWilliams, Julia McWilliams Child, Julia Carolyn Child
Julia Child Biography:
Raised in relative privilege in Pasadena, Julia Child was, as a child, something of a tomboy, enjoying athletics and dramatics more than intellectual subjects, and growing to a tall 6 feet 2 inches. She attended a private boarding school for high school and Smith College, a women's college.
After a few years in New York searching for a meaningful career, where she found jobs related to writing, Julia Child returned to California to care for her mother, who died shortly after Julia returned, and then to care for her father. She continued to find writing work, and in World War II, sought to enlist in the WAVES or the WACS. Her height was outside the limits established by those services, so she found work with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
In the OSS, she worked her way up to a supervisory position, and then, in 1944, she went to south east Asia to work for the OSS there. There, she met a diplomatic officer, Paul Child, and fell in love with him. They dated, including after both were reassigned to China. In both Ceylon and China, Julia Child was in charge of the registry in which intelligence and personnel data were processed and filed.
After the war Julia and Paul began dating again in California, and in order to impress Paul, Julia began taking cooking lessons. She was not impressed with her own efforts or progress, however -- this may have influenced her later goal of making cooking easier to learn and understand.
Their relationship progressed to marriage, and the couple moved to Washington, D.C. Then Paul, now part of the U.S. Foreign Service, was assigned to Paris.
Julia Child discovered French cooking in Paris. She studied at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, using the G.I.Bill to finance her study. She was the only woman in her class. She joined a club of French women, Cercle des Gourmettes, and there she met two French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. The three started a cooking school aimed at Americans, L'Ecole des Trois Gourmands, with classes in Julia Child's apartment, and Julia accepted their invitation to co-write a book.
Even as Julia Child moved from country to country as her husband was transferred, the three -- and after Bertholle withdrew, the two -- continued for nine years with their experimenting with recipes and writing. After several publisher rejections and a major rewrite, the book was picked up by Knopf and published as Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. It quickly became a best seller.
Paul retired and the couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and from there, Julia Child began a new stage in her career of introducing French cooking to Americans: television.
