"By the time I was ten years old, I knew that what I wanted to be most in life was a writer," recalled Patricia Calvert in Something about the Author (SATA). The circumstances of her childhood--she spent her early years with her family in a cabin in the rugged mountains of Montana--provided Calvert with ample opportunities to read and listen to the stories her mother told her and her brother. "It was our good fortune to have a mother who was a lively story-teller," noted Calvert in SATA. "She never tired of telling us sad and funny (and often outrageous!) tales about her own childhood. In addition, my mother read to us almost every evening by the light of a smoky kerosene lamp--not the traditional classics that most children hear, but a crazy assortment of detective, adventure, and love stories from such popular magazines as Liberty and Saturday...