Martha Stewart's image as the personification of gracious living may lead some to imagine that she grew up in the sort of rural luxury pictured in her books and magazine. In fact, she was born in the industrial city of Jersey City, New Jersey, a location known more for heavy industry than for rustic charm. Her parents, Martha and Edward Kostyra, were a schoolteacher and a pharmaceuticals salesman, respectively. When Martha was three, the family moved to Nutley, New Jersey, where she grew up with four brothers and sisters in a close-knit Polish-American family defined by the father's intense ambition for his children. Edward Kostyra taught his daughter gardening when she was only three; her mother taught her cooking and baking and sewing; she learned still more about baking pies and cakes from an elderly couple -- retired bakers -- who lived next door.

Martha Kostyra was a hard-working, serious child. A straight A student, she won a partial scholarship to Barnard College in New York City and worked as a model to help pay expenses. She began her college career intending to study chemistry, but later switched to art, European history and architectural history. Just after her sophomore year, she married Andrew Stewart, a law student. After graduation, she continued a successful modeling career, doing television commercials for Breck, Clairol, Lifebuoy soap and Tareyton cigarettes. In 1965, her daughter was born, and Martha Stewart quit modeling,

In 1967 she began a successful second career as a stockbroker, her father-in law's profession. Andrew Stewart founded a publishing house and served as chief executive of several others. When recession hit Wall Street in 1973, Martha Stewart left the brokerage. She and her husband moved to Westport, Connecticut, where they undertook the ambitious restoration of the 1805 farmhouse seen in her television programs. She still lives there.

In 1976, Martha Stewart started a catering business, first in partnership with a friend from college days, and then on her own. In ten years this business, which she ran out of the basement of her farmhouse, had become a $1 million enterprise. She also opened a retail store in Westport to sell specialty foods and supplies for entertaining.

She wrote articles for the New York Times and was an editor and columnist for the magazine House Beautiful. In 1982 Martha Stewart published the first of many lavishly illustrated books. Entertaining, co-written with Elizabeth Hawes, was an instantaneous success, and made Martha Stewart into a one-woman industry. Soon she was producing video tapes, dinner-music CDs, television specials and dozens of books on hors d'oeuvres, pies, weddings, Christmas, gardening and restoring old houses.

Regular appearances on the Today show made her a household name. She signed an advertising and consulting contract with Kmart for a reported $5 million. She typically earns $10,000 for a lecture and customers pay $900 a head to attend seminars at her Connecticut farm. For much of the 1980s, she was a contributing editor to Family Circle magazine before starting her own magazine, Martha Stewart Living, which attained a circulation of 1.3 million.

After appearing on multiple television specials on cable, public and network television, in 1993 Martha Stewart started a syndicated half-hour TV show called, like her magazine, Martha Stewart Living. Her enterprises have grown into a conglomerate, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. (MSO), with branches in publishing, television, merchandising and Internet/direct commerce, providing products in eight core areas: home, cooking and entertaining, gardening, crafts, holidays, housekeeping, weddings, and child care.

Over the years, Martha Stewart has shown patience and good humor in the face of the criticism and satire that are the inevitable lot of public figures in the mass media, but in 2003 she was confronted with a far greater challenge, an investigation of her personal stock trading by the Justice Department and the Securities Exchange Commission. Although she maintained her innocence of all charges, she was brought to trial in the first months of 2004. The court dismissed the original accusation of insider trading from which the other charges stemmed, but in 2004 a jury found Martha Stewart guilty of misleading federal investigators and obstructing an investigation. Although she appealed her conviction, she served a five-month prison sentence. The company she founded continues to thrive, and after her release she resumed her business career. Whatever she may yet accomplish, Martha Stewart has had more influence on how Americans, eat, entertain, and decorate their homes and gardens than any one person in our history.