Junius Edwards, who currently works for an advertising firm in New York and lives in Westchester, New York, was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, in 1929. Having studied in Chicago and at the University of Oslo in Norway, his career as a writer flourished in the late 1950s. In 1958, he won first prize in the Writer's Digest Short Story Contest for "Liars Don't Qualify"; in 1959, he received a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship for creative writing. Since the first publication of his novel If We Must Die in 1961, it has been republished by Doubleday and by Howard University Press; three short stories by Edwards have also appeared. All of his published work reflects a sensitivity to the black South and the milieu of his birth.

The title of Edwards's novel is taken from a well-known poem by Claude McKay, who rallied blacks after the First World War with "If we must...