[4] Alfred Jacob, although a British citizen, had been born in America near Philadelphia, and in 1940, after being forced out of Spain and with the situation in Britain deteriorating, the family sailed to the United States.
[5] Both parents resumed their academic studies, and Alfred eventually became a professor of Romance languages, teaching at a number of colleges in the Philadelphia area.
[6] On This American Life on July 27, 2012, Anthony revealed that his parents had divorced, he was bullied, and he had poor grades in school.
In 1957, Anthony decided to join the United States Army, as his wife was pregnant and they needed both medical coverage and a steady source of income.
After completing military service, he briefly taught at Admiral Farragut Academy in St. Petersburg, Florida before deciding to try to become a full-time writer.
[9] Anthony and his wife made a deal: if he could sell a piece of writing within one year, she would continue to work to support him.
[10] On multiple occasions Anthony has moved from one publisher to another (taking a popular series with him) when he says he felt the editors were unduly tampering with his work.
[18] Act One of episode 470 of the radio program This American Life is an account of boyhood obsessions with Piers Anthony.
For a decade he felt he must have been Anthony's number one fan, until, when he was 22, he met "Andy" at a wedding and discovered their mutual interest in the writer.
Andy is interviewed for the story and explains that, as a teenager, he had used escapist novels in order to cope with his alienating school and home life in Buffalo, New York.
After she told her father she had, "very little interest in my vampires, Ghoulies and slushy crawling things", he wrote The Eyes of the Dragon which was originally published in 1984 and later in 1987 by Viking Press.
However, Elwood told Coulson he was to be a full collaborator, free to make revisions to Anthony's text in line with suggestions made by other copy editors.
This edition contains an introduction and conclusion setting out the story of the novel's permutations and roughly 60 pages of notes by Anthony giving examples of changes to plot and characters, and describing some of the comments made by copy editors on his manuscript.