Allan W. Eckert, who was born in Buffalo, New York, and raised in the Chicago area, was graduated (1948) from Leyden Community High School in Franklin Park, Illinois, and, after four years in the United States Air Force, attended the University of Dayton (Ohio) and The Ohio State University He was founder and chairman of the board of the Lemon Bay Conservancy in Englewood, Florida, an organization which preserves wildlife and estuarial systems, and he is a life member and former trustee of the Dayton (Ohio) Museum of Natural History and similarly is a life member of the Mazon Creek Paleontological Society.

Dr. Eckert is an historian, naturalist, novelist, poet, screenwriter and playwright. The author of thirty-nine published books, he has been nominated on seven separate occasions for the Pulitzer Prize in literature and, in 1985, was recipient of an honorary degree as Doctor of Humane Letters from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In 1998 he received his second honorary doctorate, also in Humane Letters, from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. In addition to his books, he has written and had published over 150 articles, essays, and short stories, as well as considerable poetry, a major outdoor drama, and screenplays for several movies.

Biography provided by the author, January 2003.