Vincent O. Carter was born in Kansas City in 1924. At seventeen he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He landed on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 and took part in the drive toward Paris. Back in the United States, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill, earning a college degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and spending a graduate year at Wayne University in Detroit. Eventually he returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern, where he spent the rest of his life in a sort of self-imposed exile. He died there in 1983.