Calder Baynard Willingham, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on 23 December 1922, the son of Calder and Eleanor Willingham. His father was a hotel manager, a fact which certainly influenced the setting of two of his novels, Geraldine Bradshaw and Reach to the Stars. A fictional view of the depression years in the Willingham household is found in the largely autobiographical Rambling Rose. Willingham was educated at the Citadel (1940-1941), which is a model for the Academy in End as a Man, and at the University of Virginia (1941-1943). His first marriage, to Helene Rothenberg in 1945, produced one child, Paul, and he has five children from his second marriage (1953) to Jane Marie Bennett. Since the auspicious appearance of his first novel, End as a Man, Willingham has been busy producing ten novels and some half dozen screenplays.

End as a Man (1947) was greeted by James T. Farrell as a...