Leonard Cohen was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Montreal, Canada. His religion weighed heavily on his childhood: one grandfather was a rabbi who authored a 700-page volume on the Talmud while the other was the founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. His father, a successful garment purveyor, died when Leonard was only nine years old.
By age 20 Leonard Cohen was a published poet; while still an undergraduate at McGill University in Montreal he won the Chester MacNaughton Prize for Creative Writing for a series of four poems titled "Thoughts of a Landsman." In 1956 his first complete book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, was published by his former teacher and mentor at McGill, Louis Dudek.
Cohen tried his hand at law school and spent a year in the School of General Studies at Columbia University in New York City, but he soon returned to Montreal to pursue his writing. Throughout the 1960s Cohen published various works, including the poetry collections Flowers for Hitler and The Spice-Box of Earth. His 1966 novel Beautiful Losers stirred up controversy over some sexually explicit passages, but the book has remained a perennial favorite of Canadian hipsters and bohemians.
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