Gibson's youth owing to his father's position as manager of a large construction company. In Norfolk, Virginia, Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where the teachers' lack of encouragement for him to read was a cause of dismay for his parents. While Gibson was still a young child, a little over a year into his stay at Pines Elementary, his father choked to death in a restaurant while on a business trip. His mother, unable to tell William the bad news, had someone else inform him of the death. Tom Maddox has commented that Gibson "grew up in an America as disturbing and surreal as anything J. G. Ballard ever dreamed". A few days after the death of his father, Gibson and his mother moved back from Norfolk to Wytheville. Gibson later described Wytheville as "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted" and credits the beginnings of his relationship with science fiction, his "native literary culture", with the subsequent feeling of abrupt exile. At the age of 12, Gibson "wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer". He spent a few unproductive years at basketball-obsessed George Wythe High School, a time spent largely in his room listening to records and reading books. At 13, unbeknownst to his mother, he purchased an anthology of Beat generation writing, thereby gaining exposure to the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs; the lattermost had a particularly pronounced effect, greatly altering Gibson's notions of the possibilities of science fiction literature. A shy, ungainly teenager, Gibson grew up in a monoculture he found "highly problematic", consciously rejected religion and took refuge in reading science fiction as well as writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller. Becoming frustrated with his poor academic performance, Gibson's mother threatened to send him to a boarding school; to her surprise, he reacted enthusiastically. Unable to afford his preferred choice of Southern California, his then "chronically anxious and depressive" mother, who had remained in Wytheville since the death of her husband, sent him to Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson. He resented the structure of the private boarding school but was in retrospect grateful for its forcing him to engage socially. On the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) exams, he scored 148 out of 150 in the written section but 5 out of 150 in mathematics, to the dismay of his