Paul Levitt grew up in a family that revered education and thought that the measure of a great society was not how often it pandered to special interests, but how well it treated the poor. Newark, New Jersey was his place of birth. Here the author received a public education in reading and writing that aimed at accomplishment, not self- esteem. He moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. At the University of Colorado, he received a BA in philosophy and an MA in history. After a year in Florence, Italy, he attended Washington University in St. Louis and then matriculated at UCLA for an MA and a PhD in English. He has taught at the University of Colorado since 1964, with a stint as a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His interests include travel, tennis, and swimming, but most of all the reading and writing of historical fiction, which has enabled him to visit the Jazz Age (Chin Music), McCarthyism (Dark Matters), immigrants to America (Come with Me to Babylon), 12th- century England (THE SAINT-MAKERS, Cross Cultural Communications, 2009), and Soviet Russia (Stalin's Barber).
