[1] Herrick was born to Jewish parents who had come to the United States from Belarus and settled in Trenton, New Jersey.
[2] Herrick was among the Abraham Lincoln Brigade[3] which fought Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War.
whose American Communist protagonist comes to Spain in order to fight Fascism, but gets diverted into hunting down members of the dissident radical left POUM - eventually breaking away from the party and rejoining the last desperate fight of the Republic up to the fall of Barcelona.
Two other novels touch on his experience in Spain: Love and Terror (1981) and Kill Memory (1983).
His autobiography is entitled Jumping the Line: The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Radical (1998).