Thomas Alexander Boyd, novelist, journalist, and biographer was born in Defiance, Ohio, on 3 July 1898. His ancestors had been among the early settlers of the Ohio region, coming from Pennsylvania and Virginia between 1798 and 1800. Young Boyd had an uneventful childhood in the Ohio farmland. At the age of eighteen, he left high school without graduating and volunteered for the marines to fight in World War I. By September 1917, Boyd was stationed with the Sixth Regiment in France. With the Sixth, he saw action at Verdun, Belleau Wood (where he received the Croix de Guerre), Soissons, and Saint-Mihiel. On 6 October 1918, at Blanc Mont, a gas shell exploded near him ending his military career.

After his discharge from the army in July 1919, Boyd returned to the United States and began to work as a reporter for a newspaper in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In the early 1920s, Boyd became the literary editor...