W illiam Howard Armstrong was born September 14, 1914, near Lexington, Virginia. He was raised on a farm in the lovely, history-steeped Shenandoah valley, and the descriptions of southern life in his most famous novel, Sounder, reflect his Christian upbringing in the rural South. The strong individuals that play major roles in Armstrong's fiction can be traced back to the history of his neighborhood; Stonewall Jackson, the famous steelwilled Confederate general killed in the Civil War, had taught Sunday school at the same church Armstrong attended as a boy. Military history was a part of Armstrong's childhood because several Civil War battles had been fought near his home.

His love of history was cemented at the Augusta Military Academy, a private military high school that he attended from 1928 to 1932. According to his family, Armstrong wrote his first story as a cadet at Augusta, but the story...