Palacký University in Olomouc Philosophical

George Raymond Richard Martin

1. Childhood

George R. R. Martin was born on the 20^th of September 1948 in Bayonne in New Jersey to a longshoreman Raymond Collins Martin and his wife Margaret Brady Martin. As he himself said he “arrived short one “R” but fixed that at [his] confirmation thirteen years later”¹¹ when he adopted the confirmation name Richard. He was the oldest of their three children, a brother to his two younger sisters – Darleen Martin Lapinski and Janet Martin Patten.

Until 1953 the Martins lived in an old house on Broadway and 31^st street in a house that belonged to George’s great grandmother. There were a lot of adults in that house but no kids to play with, which according to Martin woke up his imagination and he started making up characters and stories. During his Torcon 3 speech he said:
“It was in the backyard that I created my first character. I suppose I was about three. Most cowboys had one six-shooter, but some had two, and that was cooler. Somehow I figured out that three would be even better than two, four would be better than three, and so on. (…) I told my mother that I was that famous desperado, Lotsa Guns, who had guns in his boots and his cowboy hat and shoved through his belt and everywhere. Admittedly, most of my armaments looked suspiciously like sticks . . . but hey, I wouldn’t be standing here today without a vivid imagination.”¹²
When he was four years old they have moved into an apartment of their own in a housing project on First Street. The place was called “LaTourette Gardens” and it was near the Bayonne Docks. From the windows of their apartment he could see the Kill van Kull Channel full of ships and the lights of Staten Island beyond it. The ships usually had flags on them and young George learnt all of them and was trying to imagine those places the flags belonged to, he dreamt of travelling.<sup>13





11</sup> “Bayonne,“ George Raymond Richard Martin, accessed August 15, 2016, http://georgerrmartin.com/life/bayonne.html.
¹² “The Heart of a Small Boy,” George Raymond Richard Martin, accessed August 15, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20110728084547/http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0410/theheartofas mall.shtml.
¹³ “Interview with George R.R. Martin,” Joanna Buffum, accessed August 15, 2016, https://seaofshelves.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/interview-george-r-r-martin/.
By this time he began to write his own stories – monster stories – and he was selling them to neighborhood children for pennies. One year he got a medieval playset with a castle and lots of knights and he used it as a house for his pet turtles. “Those were the only pets we could have. (…) I had five or six turtles who lived in the castle, I decided they were knights, lords and kings, so I started writing this whole fantasy series about the turtle kingdom and the king of the turtles.” ¹⁴ They were dying a lot for unknown reasons which caused young George to think they were killing each other in sinister plots. The story he wrote about his turtles killing each other eventually became a base for his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire.

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