From the back of the 1984 edition of The Moon's Fire Eating Daughter's "About the Author":

Courtesy of John Caldwell and Alice O'Neil McCorry Myers, I was born on January 11, 1906 in Northport, Long Island, where I was named for John Myers, my grandfather, the extra Myers, sparing me a dynastic "II" as per race horses, czars and yachts.

After conning books at St. Stephens, Middlebury and the University of New Mexico I spent a year traipsing around Western Europe and part of another following the Danube from Vienna down to the Black Sea.

On this side of the Atlantic I wandered, shouldering a knapsack, drank Prohibition under the table and functioned as a newspaperman in New York and Texas. Finding more fun than profit on the Pacific Coast next, I dug in as an advertising copy writer after skedaddling back to Manhattan.  Thence, for a change of chores, I joined a pair of cronies who had squatted on one of the Sea Islands of South Carolina.  The idea was a back to the soil stint, but as wild woods hogs guzzled our crops, we throve only by trapping them, stoking them with corn and marketing them as Pork.

Hog ranching didn't represent my true bent, however, so I returned to New York and hung out my shingle as a writer.  But in due course the Army beckoned, with the consequences that I put in five years as an enlisted man and officer of the Armored Force during World War junior.  Soldier's compensation took the form of meeting Miss Charlotte Shanahan while I was stationed at Fort Knox.  Married in 1943, C. S. Myers and I now live out in the chaparral cock country north and east of Mesa, Arizona, within visiting range of our two daughters.

Aside from writing while in Arizona I have taught it at Arizona State University, where I also conducted a writer's conference and assembled a Western Americana collection for the University Li-brary.

John Myers Myers