Sharon Olds was born on November 19, 1942, in San Francisco, California, but was brought up in Berkeley, California, along with her siblings.[5] She was raised as a "hellfire Calvinist," as she describes it.[6] Her father, like his before him, was an alcoholic who was often abusive to his children. In Olds' writing she often refers to the time (or possibly even times) when her father tied her to a chair.[7] Olds' mother was often either unable or too afraid to come to the aid of her children.
The strict religious environment in which Olds was raised had certain rules of censorship and restriction. Olds was not permitted to go to the movies and the family did not own a television, but her reading was not censored. She liked fairy tales, and also read Nancy Drew and Life magazine.[8] By nature "a pagan and a pantheist," she has said that in childhood she was exposed in her church to "both great literary art and bad literary art," with "the great art being psalms and the bad art being hymns. The four-beat was something that was just part of my consciousness from before I was born." Of her Calvinist childhood, she said in 2011 that though she was about 15 when she conceived of herself as an atheist, "I think it was only very recently that I can really tell that there's nobody there with a copybook making marks against your name."[9]
Olds was sent east to Dana Hall School, an all-girls school for grades 6 to 12 in Wellesley, Massachusetts, that boasts an impressive list of alumnae.[10] There she studied mostly English, History, and Creative Writing. Her favorite poets included William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but it was Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems that she carried in her purse through 10th grade.[11]
For her bachelor's degree Olds returned to California where she earned her BA at Stanford University in 1964. Following this, Olds once again moved cross country to New York, where she earned her Ph.D. in English in 1972 from Columbia University.[5] She teaches creative writing at New York University. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on "Emerson's Prosody," because she appreciated the way he defied convention.[10]
