Through no fault of my own, I was born the last child of poor parents on a small weed farm in southern Oklahoma and grew up during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. I had five brothers and five sisters, all of whom were infinitely smarter than I was, which gave me an inferiority complex and paranoia. When I was thirteen, my parents took me and those other siblings who were still at home down Route 66 to pick cotton in Arizona and cut grapes in California. After WW2 came along, as soon as I was old enough, I joined the U. S. Navy and went to war with the Japanese (We were on opposite sides). They had the advantage because I was in a small wooden boat called a subchaser.

After the war, I joined the U. S. Coast Guard and served aboard six different cutters on the West and East Coasts, Panama, and Alaska (primarily because I couldn't get along). Then on the G. I. Bill of Rights I went to college, got married, and became a high school English teacher in Pawnee, Oklahoma. I had had better duty. While teaching I completed the masters in English and the doctorate in English, having caught onto how to do it. During this same time my wife had four children, all of whom were infinitely smarter than their parents. From Pawnee High School I went on to teach English, speech, and journalism for ten years in a 4-year college (Northeastern, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma), English and reading for two years in a California junior college (Modesto), and English and literature for twenty-five years in a university (Southwest Missouri State, in Springfield). In 1983 I was divorced and later re-married (to Sharon Hardendorf Goforth Phares (Wright)), and when I retired we moved to Lake of the Ozarks in central Missouri. The folks on both sides of us were mucho tightbutted and bitchy; so we moved to Holly Springs, Mississippi, where tightbutted isn't even a word.

<+3>

My writing career began when I was eleven and living on a farm seven miles from town. I wrote the gossip column for my community, the River Bend (for the Konawa Leader newspaper). My first published short story was "The Killers Confession" (Wild West Weekly, about 1937, when I was going on thirteen). Down through the years I have kept a Journal (seriously since1951), written newspaper columns for the Konawa Leader in Oklahoma on two different occasions and the Ozark Headliner, in Missouri (also on two occasions), researched my paternal side of the family and compiled and published (in paperback) "The Hall Tree" (418 pp., nine generations of Halls), and published nineteen other books. I call what I write 'biographical fiction' (but, of course, occasionally I write pure fiction and pure biography.

At present I am married to a Memphis redhead who raises Arabian horses (Sharon Wright Goforth Hardendorf Phares) and working on a feral cat book, a biographical fiction about Little Red and me, and a rooster that crows at midnight.

Another nutshell

Fabulous Links