Bio
​I was born & raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was an English major at Yale during the cultural renaissance of the Sixties, and after graduation I fled to British Columbia rather than participate in the American War in Vietnam. Four years later, I returned to the States, to rural New Hampshire, and wrote my first published novel, Border Crossings. It was a love story about a draft resister, set at Yale in 1969-70, and I might have drawn on my own experiences for material.
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At the suggestion of an archaeologist friend that I should write a ‘prehistoric’ novel about one of the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica, I went off to the University of New Hampshire Library, where I discovered a rich subject in the Aztecs. It was not a subject I had ever learned about in school, which made it even more intriguing. Suddenly, doing research was exciting, inspiring me to comb through bibliographies and order through Inter-Library Loan and contact experts in the field. I then went to Mexico with my friend Dave, and we climbed to the top of the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan, the Place of the Gods. This experience produced The Luck of Huemac, my second novel.
Bitten by the Pre-Columbian bug, I turned next to the Maya, and one expert told me right off that we didn’t know enough. The Mayan glyphs hadn’t been deciphered at that point, and the field was just getting away from pretending that the Maya were peaceable folk who built those huge temples just for quiet religious celebrations. But William Haviland, of the Tikal Project, took me under his wing, and I benefited from the advice of other scholars to write Tikal, even though I was unable to visit the site at that time because of political unrest in Guatemala.
My editor at Random House advised against it, but I went on to study the Incas, which meant meeting more wonderfully helpful scholars, and taking a memorable research trip to Bolivia and Peru. Everyone should see Machu Picchu and Cuzco before they die. This one took a long time to write but was finally The Incas.
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Rising from the Ruins was written as comic relief, based on a year spent in a Maryland suburb and unofficial lore from the Tikal Project. It’s about a writer who goes off on an archaeological dig on the Mexico/Guatemala border, trying to find—in unearthing the past—his own way forward.
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I began research for Captive in Babylon more than a decade ago, interviewing scholars, visiting exhibits, plumbing secondary sources. The book goes back to the time of King Nebuchadnezzar, 584 B.C.E., seen through the eyes of the Judeans who were taken captive and brought to Babylon in two successive exiles, and who struggled to keep their native culture alive against the pressure of the dominant power. The hero is a Judean boy named Nathan, born in Babylon, a gifted scribe who knows more about the Babylonian gods than he does about the Lord God of Israel. Until he’s thrown together with Zedekiah, the last King of Judah, who’s been blinded and brought to Babylon in chains. This is where Nathan’s education as a Judean begins…