[1] Saxton was raised on the East Side of Manhattan, his parents were known to have famous writers over for dinner such as Thornton Wilder and Aldous Huxley.
[1] He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard (John F. Kennedy was a classmate), but dropped out in his junior year to become a laborer in Chicago.
"[2] While working on the novels, Saxton was a full-time organizer of maritime workers and longshoremen in San Francisco, and he also wrote prolifically for many left-wing publications.
Whether organizing unions, advocating for civil rights or fighting fascism in Spain, all shared an urgent sense that the time had come in human history for crossing from an ethics of individual achievement, to one of moral responsibility for the social order one lived in.
[4] As Claire Potter wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education soon after his death: Saxton taught American history at UCLA from 1968 until his retirement in 1990.