from Pennsylvania, but left it ambiguous as to whether the exact location was Pittsburgh, a nearby industrial town named McKeesport, or even Philadelphia. In any case, according to family members and school records, he was born in Pittsburgh (Bourdon 14).
             Warhol was the youngest of three sons of Ondrej and Julia Zavacky Warhola. His parents were immigrants from the Slovak Republic, the former Czechoslovakia, whose citizens came from farming families and endured a lifetime of poverty. Ondrej and Julia Warhol were about twenty and sixteen years old, respectively, when they first met, in either 1908 or 1909. Their marriage was based purely on physical infatuation, which later led to marriage troubles. Warhol's father, Ondrej, was a construction worker and his mother, Julia, worked part-time cleaning houses. Julia Warhola also made and sold decorative tin flowers that she had made from fruit cans. She would sell the decorative tins in the more affluent parts of Oakland, molding Warhol's early impressions of a can. "That's the reason I did my first tin-can paintings Warhol once said, referring to the Campbell's soup-can paintings that brought him initial fame (Koestenbaum 3). Warhol's family lived in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression as well as World War II, exposing Andy to death and poverty throughout his childhood. Since the time Warhol was born, he felt coldly rejected by society due to his poverty and witnessing the events of the war.
             Andy Warhol spent much of his life deliberately obscuring his origins in Pittsburgh. Yet it was his early years in that city, from 1928 to 1949, that helped shape his values and influenced his later art (Bourdon 14). Warhol attended Soho Elementary School at the age of five for only one day. A girl hit him and he to burst into tears. Andy was so traumatized by this event that he refused to return to school for two years. His refusal to attend school was Warhol's first significant ...