george rr martin

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George R.R. Martin was born on September 20, 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey, to Raymond and Margaret Martin. When George was 5, his family moved from their grandmother’s house on Broadway to a federal housing project near the docks. Due to his mother’s mistrust of the area, Martin’s childhood consisted mainly of “First Street to Fifth Street", between his grade school and his home. This limited world led him to invest in his imagination and books. During his childhood, as other children played outside, Martin became a voracious reader, consuming as much literature as he could get his hands on. After the birth of his first sister and the subsequent move to a larger apartment, Martin’s new view of the bay and returning ships led him to memorize a list of flags, in order to figure out where each ship was returning from. Martin would spend hours gazing out to sea, imagining places in the world he could never hope to visit. As a teenager, Martin wrote short stories, often concerning monsters and mythical kingdoms, to sell to other teenagers for spending money. In one of Martin’s kingdoms, the pet turtles began dying in mysterious ways. Martin decided that the turtles had been killing each other off in sinister plots. In high school, Martin became an avid comic book reader, and a letter of his to the editor of Fantastic Four became published in an issue of the comic. Through this, Martin became connected with other fans of the comic, and won an award for his superhero story Watson 2 “Powerman vs. The Blue Barrier”. In 1970, Martin graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern University, and completed a Master’s degree in Journalism a year later. Due to his objection to the Vietnam War, Martin obtained a conscientious objector status. ... ... middle of paper ... ...hen King Joffrey orders it taken off. Book readers and show watchers alike were surprised and horrified that their favorite character had been killed so quickly. Martin’s unpredictability is off-putting to some audiences, but Martin enjoys it. Martin wants his readers to never be bored, but instead fear to turn the next page. But some critics express distaste for the graphic descriptions of sex in his novels. Martin responds, “I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.”

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