Don L. Lee was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the son of Jimmy and Maxine Graves Lee. He attended Dunbar Vocational High School in Chicago, Chicago City College (A.A., 1966), Roosevelt University in Chicago (1966-1967), and the University of Illinois,Chicago Circle. From 1960 to 1963 he served in the U.S. Army. Lee has had a varied background. He was an apprentice museum curator at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago from 1963 to 1967. While in Chicago, he worked as a stock department clerk for Montgomery Ward in 1963-1964, as a post office clerk in 1964-1965, and he was a junior executive for Spiegel Incorporated in 1965-1966. In the late 1960s, however, he abandoned the business world for the academic one, becoming a writer-in-residence at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (1968-1969), at Northeastern Illinois State College in Chicago (1969-1971), at Morgan State College in Baltimore (1972-...