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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