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Hugh Hefner went to Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz High School in Chicago, then served in the U.S. Army during the closing months of World War II.
Hugh Hefner graduated from the University of Illinois in 1949 with a major in psychology and a double minor in creative writing and art. He explains that some of the ideas for the Playboy magazine came to him while he was a student there. Despite spending less than three years in college before graduating, Hugh Hefner found time to edit the magazine Shaft and sold cartoons to magazines. His first salaried job was with a firm that produced and printed cardboard cartons. In 1949, Hugh Hefner also completed a semester of graduate courses in sociology and women and gender studies at Northwestern University, where he wrote a term paper examining U.S. sex laws in light of the newly published Kinsey Institute research on male human sexuality.
Hugh Hefner married fellow Northwestern student Mildred Williams on June 25, 1949, and had two children, Christie and David Paul (b. 30 August 1955). Christie is Chairperson of Playboy Enterprises. Mildred and Hugh Hefner divorced after ten years of marriage in 1959.
After serving in the subscription department and as a copywriter for Esquire, he left in January 1952 after being denied a $5 raise. He worked at Children's Activities, then took his biggest gamble in 1953 by lending his furniture for $600 and raising $8,000 from 45 investors -- including $1,000 from his mother ("Not because she believed in the venture," he told E! in 2006, "but because she believed in her son") -- to launch Playboy.
