Jay Dunston Milner attended high school in Lubbock where he played on a state championship football team. He graduated from Southern Mississippi University with a B.A. and M.A. and coached football before becoming a reporter for the Hattiesburg, Mississippi American and the Associated Press. He was managing editor of Hodding Carter's Greenville, Mississippi Delta Democrat-Times and went to New York as assistant to the editorial page editor of the New York Herald Tribune. He returned to Texas in 1961 and fell in with a rowdy crowd of Texas prose and song writers to whom much of this book is devoted. He lives in Fort Worth.