"The cardinal sin is boredom," Harold Norse believes. In his search for "rational reasons for believing in the absurd," Norse has ranged far distances. He spent fifteen years (1953-1968) in self-exile wandering Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Now, he calls San Francisco home. He ended up there because, simply, it is a city where he had always wanted to live.

Harold George Norse was born 6 July 1916 in Bronx, New York, and grew up in Brooklyn. His name at birth was Rosen.

His first work was published, when he was nine, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a newspaper Walt Whitman had edited in the 1840s and 1850s. Although unable to remember the contents of that poem, Norse recalls that a later poem he wrote at the age of twelve (also published in the Daily Eagle) was a nature poem describing a thunderstorm.

Norse began writing at the...