Antheil was born George Johann Carl Antheil, and grew up in a family of German immigrants in Trenton, New Jersey. His father owned a local shoe store in the city. Antheil got his education in the Trenton public schools. He was raised bilingually, writing music, prose, and poetry from an early age, and never formally graduated from high school or college, flunking out of Trenton Central High School in 1918. According to Antheil's autobiography, "The Bad Boy of Music" (1945), he was "so crazy about music", that his mother sent him to the countryside where no pianos were available. Undeterred, George simply arranged for a local music store to deliver a piano. His somewhat unreliable memoir mythologized his origins as a futurist, and emphasized his upbringing near a noisy machine shop and an ominous prison. George's younger brother was Henry W. Antheil Jr.; he became a diplomatic courier and died on June 14, 1940, when his plane was shot down over the Baltic Sea.