While born in Dubuque, Iowa, Leonora Pruner lived most of her life in California. Writing has been an important activity since junior high. She graduated from Westmont College in 1953 and earned an MBA from Pepperdine University in 1981. Fascination with a possible eighteenth-century English character led to five years of extensive research. On trips, when the family went shopping, she went to the library. The results were the 1981 and 1987 publications of two period novels, Love's Secret Storm, and Love's Silent Gift. That era remains of great interest to the author as a setting for her current work, Close to His Heart, and In the Aerie of the Wolf. From 1987 to 1997 she lived in the Republic of Maldives collecting folklore and teaching economics and computer science. While there she wrote the first drafts of her recent novels, Close to His Heart and In the Aerie of the Wolf.