Poul Anderson was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania on November 25, 1926, to Anton and Astrid Anderson.

Karen Anderson was born in Erlanger, Kentucky on September 16, 1932, to Norman and Hallie Kruse. The Ander sons were married on December 12, 1953.

In 1947, while still a college student, Poul Anderson had his first story published. When he graduated in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Minnesota, he devoted himself to writing. By 1951, he was publishing several stories a year, and in 1952, his first book, Vault of the Ages, a novel for young people, appeared. Before the end of the 1950s, Anderson was a well-established author whose works included mysteries, historical novels, and nonfiction articles, as well as science fiction; he was well established as one of America's most popular science fiction authors, with a following comparable to those for Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and A. E. Van...