In 1944, I was born in South Dakota in my great-grandmother’s house. Most of my childhood was spent living on farms near Sioux Falls.

In the early 1970’s, after graduating from Augustana and Purdue, I was hired as a full-time English Instructor at a college in a suburb of Chicago and for twenty-nine years taught Composition and Literature there as a Professor in the English Department. I took early retirement and since then have been a serious author, having written six novels: The Phoenix Sparrow: A Fable, a tale of reincarnation; The Herbert Trilogy, a group of young adult fantasy/soft science fiction books, centering on an antique grandfather clock that is also a time machine; Teufel-Hunden: “Devil-Dogs,” an autobiographical novel about Marine Corps Boot Camp in 1962; and a novella, Not Look Back: A Memoir, a fictional retrospective about life on a South Dakota farm in the 1950’s.

In the early ‘60’s, while I was in the Marines, I married my high school sweetheart, and we had a daughter, who now has two children, my nifty grandkids. After my first wife died tragically, I later remarried. My wife and I have two teenage daughters.

The most profound literary influences on me as a writer are the very authors whom I taught to college students for three decades: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Tennessee Williams. The two strongest literary influences on me, however, are the sublime poet, Emily Dickinson, and Hemingway, who wrote: “A writer should be of his great probity as a priest of God. He is either honest or not…, and after one piece of dishonest writing, he is never the same again” (Amen, Papa).

 

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