— Ch. 1 · Early Life And Education —
Roger Ebert.
~6 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Roger Joseph Ebert was born on the 18th of June 1942 in Urbana, Illinois. He grew up as the only child of Annabel and Walter Harry Ebert. His father worked as an electrician while his mother served as a bookkeeper. The family raised him Catholic within the local community. He attended St. Mary's elementary school where he also served as an altar boy. His first movie memory involved his parents taking him to see A Day at the Races by the Marx Brothers in 1937. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became the first real book he ever read. He started writing for his own newspaper called The Washington Street News printed in his basement. At age fifteen he wrote sports articles for The News-Gazette covering high school games. He graduated from Urbana High School in 1960 after serving as class president. He began attending classes at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an early-entrance student. Daniel Curley mentored him during college introducing works like Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary. Ebert received his undergraduate degree in journalism in 1964. He edited The Daily Illini during his senior year while working for the News-Gazette. He won the state speech championship in radio speaking in 1958. Later he earned a master's degree before moving to Chicago to pursue doctoral studies.
Pioneering Film Criticism
Ebert joined the Chicago Sun-Times in April 1967 following the departure of Eleanor Keane. Editor Robert Zonka gave him the job to cover films like The Graduate and Jean-Luc Godard movies. His first review described Georges Lautner's Galia with phrases about the French New Wave washing ashore. Within a day he read The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow which shaped his critical approach. That same year he met Pauline Kael at the New York Film Festival. She told him his columns were the best film criticism being done in American newspapers today. He reviewed Ingmar Bergman's Persona in 1966 describing it without needing to explain its meaning. One of his earliest reviews championed Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde as a milestone in American movie history. He wrote Martin Scorsese's first review for Who's That Knocking at My Door in 1967. Ebert co-wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls released in 1970. The film was poorly received upon release but later became a cult classic. He also collaborated on Up! in 1976 and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens in 1979.