Chandler Brossard is one of the generation of gifted novelists whose work, coming in the years after World War II, helped define a new emerging American temperament. He was born on 18 July 1922 in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and has chosen not to discuss his early life except in his fiction. He left school at the age of eleven and otherwise is self-educated. At the age of eighteen he found a job with the Washington Post , in Washington, D.C., as a journalist; then early in the war years he moved to New York City.

From 1942 to 1943 he was on the staff of the New Yorker magazine, but found that it was impossible for him to fit into the New Yorker mold. As he told an interviewer in 1979, "While I was a 'Talk of the Town' reporter on The New Yorker, many years ago, I was 20-21 at the time...