Diane Arbus was born as Diane Nemerov and became Diane Arbus upon marrying Allan Arbus. She was not affected by the Great Depression, unlike most of the population growing up in the 1930s, because her family was exceptionally well-off. Both of her siblings would also grow up to be artists, her sister a sculptor. Her brother Howard Nemerov would actually become a United States Poet Lauerate. The artistic talent ran in the Nemerov family. She attended the Fieldston School for ethical Culture, which is a prep school located in the Riverdale neighborhood in the Bronx, New York. Her daughter Doon would become a writer and her daughter Amy would become a photographer. Both of her daughters were had with her first and only husband, Allan Arbus. The two separated in 1958, and divorced officialy in 1969. She was good friends with a lot of famous photographers, including Richard Avedon and Walker Evans. Later in life, around her divorce, she started experiencing symptoms of depression, which were possibly brought on by symptoms of hepatitis. Allan Arbus noted that she had “violent changes of mood”, and she herself confessed to going “up and down a lot.” On July 26, 1971, Arbus, while living at Westbeth Artists Community in NYC, ingested barbiturates and cut her wrists with a razor, killing herself at the young age  of 48. As put eloquently by Daniel Oppenheimer, “Her story…fits the popular ’60s template of the romantic, tragic, brilliant, unconventional, tortured artist — Sylvia Plath, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix — who was too beautiful to survive in the fallen world.” She always felt her work was nothing too revolutionary, rather, she did it just because she enjoyed it. She was very earnest in admitting the selfishness of her photography style, she did it because it interested her and no one else was doing it. There was no financial or vain reasoning, if you asked her she would say that she just, to put it bluntly, did what she did because she could.