Gordon Parks was born on November 20, 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, to Sarah and Andrew Jackson Parks. The youngest of 15 children, he attended local schools and left Fort Scott at sixteen after his mother died, then went to live with a sister in St. Paul, Minnesota. After a disagreement with his sister's husband, he became homeless and survived by various means, including playing piano in a brothel, mopping floors, and washing store windows, while twice trying to finish high school in Minnesota. Later, while working as a waiter on a transcontinental train, he was inspired by photographs in a magazine and bought his first camera, a Voigtländer Brilliant, for $12.50 at a pawnshop. He began working in fashion, and his photographs attracted the attention of Marva Louis, who encouraged him to move to Chicago in 1940, where he started a portrait business specializing in society women. After receiving the first fellowship in photography from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation in 1941, he chose to work with Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration in Washington, D.C., where he took his first professional photograph, American Gothic. When the FSA closed in 1943, he became a freelance photographer, balancing fashion work with documenting humanitarian issues. His 1948 photo essay on the life of a Harlem gang leader brought him widespread acclaim and made him the first African-American staff photographer and writer for LIFE magazine, where he remained for two decades and chronicled racism, poverty, celebrities, and politicians. His talents extended to filmmaking, writing, music, and poetry, and he became the first African-American to direct a film for a major studio, Warner Brothers. Based on his biographical novel, The Learning Tree, his first full-length film was shot in Fort Scott and was based on his childhood there; later films included Shaft and Leadbelly. He also created a piano concerto, a symphony for orchestra, a ballet honoring Martin Luther King Jr., and twenty-three books. He received the National Medal of Arts from President Reagan in 1988, spent much of the last three decades of his life expanding his style and experimenting with color photography, continued working until his death in 2006, and received more than 50 honorary doctorates.