Biographical Note

I was born in 1931 in Huntington, New York, grew up there, graduated from Princeton, served in the U.S. Navy, graduated from Columbia Law School, and worked as a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. I conceived of the idea and wrote the prototype and first book for Bantam’s classic Choose Your Own Adventure series, wrote many other books in the series, and created other series and works of fiction and non-fiction, including Imagining the Universe (1994), which received a Scientific American book award. In 2016, I self-published It’s a Miracle It Wasn’t Worse, a memoir of growing up on Long Island in the 1930s and 1940s. Since December, 2016, I’ve been posting a daily blog on this website. I expect to continue it for the foreseeable future. Also posted on this website is my essay “The View from Ninety-Two,” (a slightly revised version of its predecessor, “The View from Ninety”), which I was inspired to write by realizing how radically my view of life, and of myself, had changed from what it had been until my late eighties. In January, 2023, I completed writing a revised version of a novel titled Continuance: A Tale of Two Planets and made it available for downloading from this website.