Eric Kraft grew up in Babylon, New York, on the South Shore of Long Island, where he was for a time co-owner and co-captain of a clam boat, which sank. He studied English at Harvard, where he invented the character Peter Leroy while dozing over a German lesson during his first year. The following year, he married his muse, Madeline Canning; they now have two sons. After earning a Master's Degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Kraft taught school in the Boston area for a while, moonlighting as a rock music critic for the Boston Phoenix. After a series of positions in editing and publishing, Kraft and his wife founded Kraft & Kraft, an editorial-services company for educational publishers. Throughout the years, he wrote daily, trying to discover the stories that Peter Leroy had to tell. Eric Kraft is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was, briefly, chairman of PEN New England. He is also a recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.Learn more at www.erickraft.com.