Pete Dexter

His father died when Dexter was four and he and his mother moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, where she married a college physics professor.

[5] He earned his undergraduate degree in 1969 from the University of South Dakota, which awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters and Literature in 2010.

Dexter began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in the Devil's Pocket, neighborhood in South Philadelphia, in which a mob of locals armed with baseball bats beat him severely.

Lego's brother, Tommy, the night bartender at Dougherty's, was also on the phone, screaming at the then-38-year-old columnist, demanding a retraction.

[5][6][9] Dexter holds a position as Writer in Residence in the creative writing program at the University of South Dakota.