George Harold Bennett was born in Buckingham, Virginia, and although he was reared in the North, his memories of childhood summers spent in the South are the basis of the Southern setting of his fiction. Bennett attended schools in Newark, New Jersey, became a feature writer on the Newark Herald News at sixteen, edited his high-school yearbook, and served in the U.S. Air Force, where he was a writer for the Public Information Division and edited a newspaper for 15,000 airmen in Korea. After his discharge, he and two others started their own newspaper in Westbury, Long Island, and when that venture failed, Bennett attended Mexico City College, where he was a fellow of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores and wrote most of his first novel, which won him a fiction fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1966. He was selected most promising young writer of the...