 His mother Jane de Jonge is an artist.After graduating from Princeton University in 1977, de Jonge worked for weekly papers in Ridgefield, Wilton and Redding, Connecticut, and for the Associated Press in Newark and Albany.In the mid-eighties, while employed as a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson in New York, de Jonge he began writing for "Manhattan, inc., The New York Times Magazine" and "National Geographic."