Stanley Eskin was born and raised in France until he was ten, and did not come to know his father, Sam Eskin, well until he was eighteen, as described in this memoir. He was educated at Columbia, with an A.B. in classics, an M.A. in English, and a PhD. in Comparative Literature, and also studied for a year at the University of Rome. He served in the U.S. army for two years, and has taught literature at Yale, Berkeley, Bennington College, and the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and also, twice, as a visiting Fulbright professor in Mexico and in Guatemala. He has held Fulbright and ACLS fellowships and published many scholarly and critical articles in various periodicals, as well as a critical biography of Georges Simenon. He has lived in Europe for extended periods, in New York City and in Woodstock, and now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife, Barbara, his son, Julian, and his dog, Fleck. For some years, he has spent much of his time writing unpublished fiction and non-fiction, as well as reading, traveling, cooking, and puttering about.