John Bellairs was bom on January 17, 1938, in Marshall, Michigan, a small, picturesque mid-Michigan town which has endeavored to sustain its heritage by preserving its magnificent nineteenth-century commercial and private buildings. Bellairs, whose father managed a saloon on Marshall's main street, was taught at the local Catholic school and attended St. Mary's, the town's Catholic church. A short, chubby child, he lacked the athletic ability to join his schoolmates in playground sports and turned instead to reading encyclopedias, history books, and novels. This imaginative exercise would later enable him to turn his childhood experiences into material for his earliest novels. He later left Marshall to attend Notre Dame University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1959; he earned a master's degree at the University of Chicago in 1960 and began working on his doctorate. While doing so, he accepted a series of teaching appointments that were...