Jonathan Carroll was born in New York City on January 26, 1949. His father Sidney was a writer whose film credits include The Hustler (1961), A Big Handfor the Little Lady (1966) and the story basis for Gambit (1966); his mother June (née Sillman), was an actress and lyricist who appeared in numerous Broadway shows and two films: An Angel Comes to Brooklyn (1945) and New Faces (1952). Jonathan would have been twelve years old when his father, together with director Robert Rossen, adapted Walter Tevis's novel The Hustler into avehicle for Paul Newman; the following year, their screenplay was among the film's eight Academy Award nominations.Some years later, Carroll recalls that his father was consoled with an Emmy Award for a documentary he wrote about the Louvre gallery, a fact which Carroll Jr, then at preparatory school, remembers using to impress a girl.
His parents' professions meant that many of his early years were spent between houses on the East and West coasts, and, perhaps predictably, Carroll admits to having reacted against his upbringing by becoming "a kind of juvenile delinquent". According to most sources, this rebellious youth was curtailed when a friend was shot dead by police, and the teenage Carroll was packed off to The Loomis School, "one of those snooty 'Catcher in the Rye' kind of schools in Connecticut." Shortly after graduating cum laude from Rutgers University, he married artist Beverly Schreiner on June 19, 1971. He subsequently studied for his Masters Degree at the University of Virginia, while working as an English teacher, first at the North State Academy in Hickory, North Carolina, and then at St.Louis County Day School. A desire to teach English abroad led him to the American International School in Vienna, Austria. He currently lives and writes in Vienna, while his son, Ryder, works as a graphic artist in New York City.
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