Nationality 1: American

Birthdate: 1938

D. L. (Donald Lee) Coburn was born on August 4, 1938, in East Baltimore, Maryland, to Guy Dabney and Ruth Margaret Somers Coburn. East Baltimore is an impoverished neighborhood, and Coburn's childhood was made the more difficult by his parents' divorce when he was only two. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1958 to 1960, right after graduating from high school. Coburn operated a one-person advertising agency in Baltimore from 1965 to 1968 and then worked for the Stanford Advertising Agency in Dallas, Texas. He married Marsha Woodruff Maher in 1975 and has two children, Donn and Kimberly, from a previous marriage, to Nazle Joyce French (1964-1971).

When he was thirty years old, Coburn began writing short stories for his own gratification and discovered that he had a talent for dialogue. After seeing Thomas Troupe's one-act play Diary of a Madman (adapted from the work of the Russian...