I was born at home in Oklahoma, after my mother spent part of the morning hoeing in the garden. It was a pretty old-fashioned family even for that time (1945) and place. My father was a scarecrow. We subsequently moved to California, where my memories begin. I remember the first flake of snow I ever saw. (It disappeared before I got a good look at it.) Since then I've lost track of snowflakes; we moved back to Missouri (my mother's natal state) when I was eight, and I have been a confirmed Midwesterner ever since. I decided, about age six, that I wanted to be a writer. I even wrote a couple of stories. I concluded that I was not yet ready to be a writer, so postponed it until I was grown up. At age eleven, I concluded that I now knew enough to be a writer; for instance, I now understood improper fractions. I knew, of course, that I would rarely have occasion to mention improper fractions in my stories, but I argued that my knowledge of them indicated that I had acquired a great deal of other knowledge which I could use. A sophisticated argument for an eleven-year-old. (To this day I have never mentioned improper fractions in a story.)