Francine du Plessix Gray was born on September 25, 1930 in Warsaw, Poland.  She was the daughter of a French diplomat,  Vicomte Bertrand Jochaud du Plessix and a Russian refugee mother, Tatiana Yokovleva. She spent her early years in Paris in a mulitcultural and multilingual society.  In 1940, her father, a Sub-lieutenent in the Free French Air force died when his plane was shot down near Gibraltar. In 1940 or 1941, she, her mother and her soon to be stepfather, Alexander Liberman, escaped Nazi-occupied France via Lisbon to New York. During the first six months in the United States, Francine lived with her mother's father(whom she had never met) in Rochester, New York while her mother settled in. She grew up in New York City.  She was a scholarship student to Spence School, attended Bawr College and received a B.A. from Barnard College in 1952.  In that year, she also became a naturalized U. S. citizen. At twenty-six, after a brief Paris fashion career had left her anorexic and depressed, she married Cleve Gray, an artist, and retired to a Connecticut farmhouse where she raised two sons and wrote numerous books including the Pullitzer Prize nominated book At Home with Marquis de Sade: a Life.

 Last Updated On: 6/17/09