Author Bio
I'm a native New Yorker born 65 years ago this year. In 1943, my family moved to a city project on the East River opposite the present site of the UN building and then in 1952 to Lindenhurst, Long Island. It meant a long commute for my truck-driver dad but he was living the post-war American dream and suburbia was bliss for him. I felt kidnapped. Most of all, I missed my favorite hang-out, the local rerun movie house appropriately called The Beacon. It is where my visual vocabulary, my acute visual literacy was born and nurtured. Since the movies evolved from photography—as opposed to tv, child of radio—I was taught by images to look at what I saw. I look therefore I am. It makes perfect sense that my professional life has been about pictures, and by extension with my passion for reading and the word: a life writing novels.
I've just finished Willa Cather's radiant The Professor's House and am currently reading my last Dickens work Barnaby Rudge. The books I treasure most are The Tale of Genji, Remembrance of Things Past, Absalom! Absalom!—the reason Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha map is in Cartographia—his Snopes trilogy (Hamlet, Town, Mansion), and the novels of Raymond Chandler and Dostoevsky (in the new translations) to name but a choice few.
After Lindenhurst High School, I went to St. Bonaventure University and then Yale Graduate School in 1964 where I met my life-partner, the creator of Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Kaye Wayefaring, James McCourt, who encouraged me to publish my first novel Gaywyck in 1980. Two more followed along with over 150 picture inserts, which I researched, edited, designed, and captioned for books by people as diverse as John Wayne, Jane Fonda, Bill and Hillary Clinton. I've also published six picture books of my own.