Daniel James Brown

The Boys in the Boat exists because Brown's elderly neighbour, dying in the house next door, turned out to have rowed in the University of Washington eight that won the 1936 Olympics in Berlin in front of the German leadership. Joe Rantz had been abandoned by his family as a boy and left to feed himself through the Depression, and it is his life rather than the racing that carries the book. Facing the Mountain follows Japanese American soldiers of the 442nd fighting through Europe while their families sat in American internment camps. Brown taught writing and worked as a technical editor first, and each book rests on interviews with people who were shortly going to be unavailable.