In 1962, Kingsolver's father chose to practice medicine where he felt he could make a significant difference in the lives of others. He took his family first to St. Lucia, an island nation in the Caribbean, where they lived in a convent hospital, and then to central Africa. While living in Africa, Kingsolver experienced what it was like to be a minority and an outsider. She was the only white child in the village. At the time, her hair was long enough to sit on, and the village children, never having seen hair like Kingsolver's, tried to pull it off as though it were some sort of headpiece. Kingsolver's experiences opened her eyes to the world and provoked her curiosity about people from other cultures. By the time she was eight years old, Kingsolver resolutely kept a daily journal and entered every essay contest for which she was eligible.
Other important influences on Kingsolver during her childhood included the county Bookmobile, large family vegetable gardens, and a community that depended on the kindness of others to get by.
Having returned to Nicholas County to attend public school, Kingsolver graduated from Nicholas County High School in 1973. She then attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, on a scholarship to study instrumental music, a lifelong interest of hers. In college, Kingsolver changed her major to biology and worked to eliminate her rural Kentucky accent and the expressions she had adopted from that particular region, both of which seemed to invite teasing. (Much later, Kingsolver realized how unique her language was and has attempted to re-create it in her writing.) While in college, she was exposed to the writings of feminist authors Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and studied German philosophers and socialists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. She took one creative writing class and participated in anti-Vietnam War protests. She graduated from DePauw magna cum laude in 1977 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and then moved to Tucson, Arizona, where she began graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona and worked as a research assistant in the physiology department until 1979.
