Michael Foster wrote about those Americans living after the Depression and during World War II who worried about how to guide their children into an uncertain future and looked for answers lost in the past. Known primarily for his best-seller and Literary Guild selection American Dream (1937), Foster depicted defeated idealists who became cynical but sometimes rediscovered meaning by examining their ancestors' dreams.

Much of Foster's own life is reflected in his novels. Foster was born in Hardy, Arkansas, where his family spent their summers. His father had started a frontier newspaper in the Dakotas (like John Thrall in American Dream), but before Michael's birth he settled in Rockford, Illinois, where he was a lawyer and banker. After attending the Chicago Art Institute, Foster was a newspaper reporter and cartoonist for the Daily Union in Salina, Kansas, the Seattle Union Record, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. At various times he...