Dorothea Lange lived with her mother in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her mother Joan worked in a library in New York City on the lower East Side of Manhattan. Every day Dorothea would go to school near her mother's job and after school she would go to the library to wait for her mother to go home. She used to read book and look down on the streets full of noisy pedestrians, and would focus on every detail. She spent hours looking at photographs. She would study them in the library, on the walls in her classroom, in newspapers, and magazines. The one that touched her the most she would put up on her wall in her room.

Dorothea was very unhappy in school because no one knew who she was and she had no friends in school. She was the only non-jew in her school and she felt like an outsider. Dorothea never joined any clubs and never played any games. S

Dorothea's grandparents on both sides had moved from Germany to America hoping for a better life. Her father was Henry Nutzhorn, a young lawyer. Dorothea's family moved several times from one town to the next , then back to Hoboken.When she was only seven, Dorothea came down with polio, a paralyzing illness. The illness damaged Dorothea's right leg from the knee down. It made her lame for the rest of her life. All the children called her "Limpy" and that made her upset. Even her mother was ashamed to walk in the streets with a crimpled child. It made her bitter that her mother acted this way but it did not stop her from facing the challenges of life.

In 1917, she signed up for a professional course with a master photographer named Clarence White. That year Dorothea made many portraits on her own. She took pictures of family, friends, neighbors, and children. But in 1918, Dorothea and her friend Fronsie left home and moved to San Francisco, but when they got there they were robbed. They had to get jobs to eat. Dorothea got a job at a camera supply stored named Marsh's. That was when she decided to drop her father's last name and add her mother's maiden name.

One night Dorothea's father took her to see A Midsummer Night's Dream. He hired a coach and a horse to take them there. When they got there, there weren't any seat available, so he put her on his shoulder's to watch the show. One day, he left her. She was about twelve years old when her parents got divorced. Her father deserted the family and Dorothea never saw him again. He never wrote, call, or visited after that. Dorothea never knew why he left her, she was so terrified by it that she never spoke of him again.

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Approximate Word count = 1210
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)