Timothy Fitzgerald was born in 1955, the fifth of nine children, in the Southern Indiana river town of Evansville. Evansville is a heavy manufacturing and industrial town, and as a growing boy, Fitzgerald spent a great amount of time exploring and playing in the "boneyards" of several metal fabricating and scrap metal companies. These industrial facilities not only influenced Fitzgerald's artistic style, but it is to these boneyards that he would later return to obtain materials for his sculpture. Fitzgerald's father, Gerald J. Fitzgerald, sold insurance for a living, but painted and sculpted in his spare time. It was after this exposure to his father's artwork that Fitzgerald chose to concentrate his high school studies on the industrial arts, with an interest in both metal and woodworking. After finishing high school, Fitzgerald spent three years recovering from a near-fatal car accident. In 1976 he was able to enroll at Indiana State University, Evansville, which is now known as the University of Southern Indiana. His studies were first geared toward the study of philosophy, due to the influence of his two older brothers, who now both hold doctoral degrees in philosophy and teach. It was not long before Fitzgerald's interest in philosophy and his involvement in the art-making process merged. At this time, ISU-E had a small but strong school of Art. The school of Art had recently acquired, from the school of Industrial Arts, a very large pre-existing facility, fully equipped with all the machines and tools necessary for both metal and woodworking. Due to his previous studies in industrial arts, Fitzgerald was already familiar with all the equipment now available for making art. This background helped him to select sculpture as his field of study, and his interest in three-dimensional work also developed during this period.