[2] Originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,[3] he moved to DeLand, Florida with his family at age 12[3] and later graduated from Stetson University.
[3] During the book's promotional tour, he told media that the novel was "25 per cent autobiographical", but refused to specify which 25 percent.
[3] He later published Panthers in the Skins of Men, a sequel novel about Kurt Strom's readaptation to post-military life in the United States, in 1989.
[6] At the time of the original publication of The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up, he also had an outline planned for a third Kurt Strom novel,[4] but it remained unpublished at his death, of colon cancer, in 2003.
The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up is the subject of an essay by Jim Marks in the 2010 non-fiction anthology The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered.