Le Carré, John

Born David John Moore Cornwell in Poole, county of Dorset, England, John le Carré grew up in a troubled home. While his father served a prison sentence for fraud, his mother left the family when David was five years old. He did not see her again until he was 21. He grew up at boarding schools and in his father’s home, before he got the opportunity to enter higher education at age 16. He studied languages in Switzerland, and soon became proficient enough in German to study German literature at the University of Bern in the late 1940s.