Bill O'Reilly

O'Reilly was born on September 10, 1949, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan to parents William James Sr. and Winifred Angela (née Drake) O'Reilly from Brooklyn and Teaneck, New Jersey, respectively. He is of Irish descent with a small degree of English (Colonial American) ancestry. Some of his father's ancestors lived in County Cavan, Ireland, since the early eighteenth century, and on his mother's side he has ancestry from Northern Ireland. The O'Reilly family lived in a small apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey, when their son was born. In 1951, his family moved to Levittown on Long Island. O'Reilly has a sister, Janet.

O'Reilly attended St. Brigid parochial school in Westbury and Chaminade High School, a private Catholic boys high school, in Mineola. His father wanted him to attend Chaminade, but O'Reilly wanted to attend W. Tresper Clarke High School, the public school most of his closest friends would attend. He played Little League baseball and was the goalie on the Chaminade varsity hockey team. During his high school years, he met future singer Billy Joel, whom O'Reilly described as a "hoodlum". O'Reilly recollected in an interview with Michael Kay on the YES Network show CenterStage that Joel "was in the Hicksville section—the same age as me—and he was a hood. He used to slick it [his hair] back like this. And we knew him, because his guys would smoke and this and that, and we were more jocks."

After graduating from Chaminade in 1967, O'Reilly attended Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. While at Marist, he was a punter in the National Club Football Association and also wrote for the school's newspaper, The Circle. He was an honors student who majored in history. He spent his junior year of college abroad, attending Queen Mary College at the University of London. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1971. He played semi-professional baseball during this time as a pitcher for the New York Monarchs. After graduating from Marist College, O'Reilly moved to Miami where he taught English and history at Monsignor Pace High School from 1970 to 1972. He returned to school in 1973 and earned a Master of Arts degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University. While attending Boston University, he was a reporter and columnist for various local newspapers and alternative news weeklies, including the Boston Phoenix, and did an internship in the newsroom of WBZ-TV. In 1995, he attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and received a master of public administration degree in 1996.

Marist College had bestowed an honorary degree upon O'Reilly, which would later be revoked once the sexual abuse allegations came to light.