Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929,[5] the elder of two sisters. Her father, pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was the chairman of pathology at The Johns Hopkins Medical School. Her mother, Helen Elizabeth (Jones) Rich,[6] was a concert pianist and a composer. Her father was from a Jewish family,[7] and her mother was a Southern Protestant;[8] the girls were raised as Christians. Her paternal grandfather Samuel Rice was an Ashkenazi immigrant from Košice in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present day Slovakia), while his mother was a Sephardic Jew from Vicksburg, Mississippi. Samuel Rice owned a successful shoe store in Birmingham.[9]
Adrienne Rich's early poetic influence stemmed from her father, who encouraged her to read but also to write poetry. Her interest in literature was sparked within her father's library, where she read the work of writers such as Ibsen,[10] Arnold, Blake, Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tennyson. Her father was ambitious for Adrienne and "planned to create a prodigy". Adrienne Rich and her younger sister were home schooled by their mother until Adrienne commenced public education in the fourth grade. The poems Sources and After Dark document her relationship with her father, describing how she worked hard to fulfill her parents' ambitions—moving into a world in which excellence was expected.[10][11]
In later years, Rich went to Roland Park Country School, which she described as a "good old fashioned girls' school [that] gave us fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned."[12] After graduating from high school, Rich earned her diploma at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, where she focused on poetry and learning the writing craft, encountering no women teachers at all.[12]
In 1951, her senior year at college, Rich's first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was chosen by the poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. He went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Following graduation, Rich received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford for a year. After visiting Florence, she chose not to return to Oxford, and spent her remaining time in Europe writing and exploring Italy.[13]
