by John Nichols

Born in Berkeley, California, in 1940, John Nichols was raised on Long Island and educated at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. His first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo (1965), was generally well received, as was a second novel, The Wizard of Loneliness (1966). In 1969 Nichols moved from New York to New Mexico, and most of his subsequent writings, both fiction and nonfiction, deal with his adopted state. The Milagro Beanfield War, his third novel, is the first volume of Nichols’s New Mexico Trilogy, which is continued in The Magic Journey (1978) and The Nirvana Blues (1981). Nichols’s other novels include American Blood (1987), An Elegy for September (1992), and The Voice of the Butterfly (2001). A committed environmentalist, Nichols has also written several nonfiction volumes celebrating New Mexico’s natural beauty, as well as the autobiographical An American Child Supreme: The Education of a Liberation...