Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, on January 28, 1912. He was killed on August 11, 1956, near Southampton, New York. His speeding car shot off the road and hit a tree. All that is known of his early life is that he left the place of his birth with his parents and four older brothers at the age of 11 months, and that his boyhood and adolescence were spent on farms in Arizona and California. The family moved nine times between 1912 and 1928. In that year Pollock enrolled in the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles and was introduced by one of his teachers to theosophy and the teachings of Krishnamurti. He was a rebellious student, with a vague but frustrated desire to be an artist.

The dominant force in Pollock's family was his mother. She was ambitious for her sons, all of whom became artists of one kind or another. But the member of the family to whom Jackson looked as a guide to his artistic aspirations was his oldest brother Charles. Interested in art since his boyhood, Charles left home in 1922 to study at the Otis Art Institute in