Lorenz Graham, folklorist, lecturer, novelist, short-story writer, former social worker, and educator, has written four novels, four novelettes, and more than twenty-eight short stories, largely for an adolescent audience. He has also written Classics Illustrated comic-book adaptations of Macbeth, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Story of Jesus, The Time Machine, and The Ten Commandments.

A contemporary of Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. Du Bois (the second husband of his sister, author Shirley Graham), Virginia Hamilton, Margaret Walker, and Alice Walker, Graham was encouraged to become a writer after complaining to his sister that black writers only presented distorted images of black people. Agreeing with him, she insisted that artists must be allowed artistic freedom and that he should write the positive works he longed to see in print. For more than fifty years he has been presenting positive images of black people and of...