I was born and raised in Northern California, where I graduated from the University of California with a major in the dismal science. Afterward, I moved to Southern California, where I have remained ever since. At UCLA, I earned a doctorate in African history. My teaching career in that field was regrettably brief, but I managed to publish five books on Africa and have a sixth book I hope eventually to finish, even it means ebook publication. Meanwhile, I got into editing work and eventually became a reference book editor. (If you search my name in Amazon books, many of the titles that come up will be reference works I've edited.)Around 1990, my life took an unexpected turn when I renewed my youthful interest in Mark Twain by vowing to read everything he wrote. To give my reading focus, I collected interesting passages from Mark Twain's work with the idea of publishing a quote collection with the small reference-book publisher for whom I had written a book on Zimbabwe. I am now astonished to realize that I have published eight books on Mark Twain--with another due out in 2013--and have something of a reputation of an authority in Mark Twain studies. How did that happen? I'm not completely sure, but it has certainly made my life more exciting.It's now mid-2012, and I'm more than a year away from retirement from my editing job. I used that time to finish two Mark Twain books and am now on the threshold of branching into other writing fields, including fiction, still hoping the best is yet to come.