Jack Matthews was born in Columbus, Ohio, educated at Ohio State University (where he received a B.A. in English and Classical Greek in 1949 and an M.A. in English in 1954), and has taught at Ohio University since 1964. His work benefits from its firm rootedness in place even if his national reputation seems to suffer from it. In the Los Angeles Times (27 February 1972) Herbert Gold pointed out that although Matthews had had six books published at that time, his readership remained small (though ardent), and "he seems to speak from a region of silence and exile."

His first book-length fiction publication, Bitter Knowledge (1964), was a collection of thirteen stories that illustrate Matthews's penchant for taking a simple situation and demonstrating the existence of the marvelous in what might have seemed cliche. Although the stories are strong, their themes are somewhat repetitious. They are best seen as practice in...