He was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and with no hope of recovery, they divorced. To support them, Naylor wrote and worked a series of jobs including assistant executive secretary, an elementary school teacher and eventually got a job as an editorial assistant for a magazine. Years later her husband began showing signs of severe mental illness, requiring her to seek out treatment for him all over the country. When Naylor was 18 years old, she married her first husband and they soon moved to Chicago where she worked as a clinical secretary in a university hospital. Naylor graduated from Joliet Township High School in 1951 and from Joliet Junior College in 1953. She decided to expand, sending her writing to youth magazines Highlights, Seventeen, and Jack and Jill, receiving two years of rejection letters. She wrote a baseball story named "Mike's Hero" and was paid $4.67 for it. When she was 16 years old, a Sunday school teacher asked her to write a story for the church magazine. She began writing her own stories when she was in elementary school. Her favorite book as a child was Huckleberry Finn. She has said that she never felt poor, as her parents had a book collection and read stories aloud to her and her siblings until adolescence. She grew up during the Great Depression with her older sister Norma and younger brother John. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor was born in Anderson, Indiana.
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