Home interior guru Martha Stewart was born Martha Kostyra in Jersey City, New Jersey. Her father, Edward, was a pharmaceuticals salesman; while her mother, Martha, was a school teacher. When Stewart was three, the family moved to Nutley, New Jersey, where she grew up with four brothers and sisters in a very close-knit Polish-American family.  Stewart’s father was ambitious and wanted to instill the same strong work ethic into his children. Early on, he taught his daughter gardening, while her mother taught her cooking and baking and sewing. Stewart was consequently a hard-working young woman as well. She obtained partial scholarship to Barnard College in New York City and worked as a model to help pay for the rest of the expenses. Just after her sophomore year, she married Andrew Stewart, a law student. After graduation, Stewart continued a successful modeling career. In 1965, she quit modeling after the birth of her daughter.

Two years later, Stewart was working as a stockbroker. By 1973, Stewart and her husband had begun restoring her well-known 1805 farmhouse in Westport, Connecticut.

In 1976, Stewart started a catering business, first in partnership with a friend from college days, and then on her own. Ten years, later, her basement-based business had become a million dollar enterprise.

Stewart has written articles for the New York Times, served as editor and columnist for House Beautiful magazine. She published a book called Entertaining, a book of illustrations, in 1982. This became the first of many such books and became the catapult for Stewart’s rising success. Soon she was producing video tapes, dinner-music CDs, television specials and dozens of books on cuisine, interior design, and house restoration.

Her popularity increased even more with various television appearances and partnerships with such department store chains as Kmart. She was a multi-millionaire. Stewart gives lectures and exclusive seminars at her farmhouse. She was a contributing editor for Family Circle magazine for much of the 1980s until she decided to start her own publication, Martha Stewart Living, which attained a circulation of 1.3 million.

Eventually, Martha Stewart gained her own television show. In 1993, the half-hour program, also called Martha Stewart Living aired for the first time. All of her various projects and merchandise have since been merged into a conglomerate company called Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. (MSO).

In 2003 something happened to mar Stewart’s glowing image of success. Her personal stock trading practices were put under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities Exchange Commission. Despite maintaining her innocence in regard to the allegations of insider trading, the court found her guilty of other charges of obstruction and misleading federal investigators. She was remanded to a low security prison for a five-month sentence. Despite the controversy, Stewart’s company continues to thrive.