Piers Anthony

Piers Anthony was born in Oxford, England, in August, 1934. Both parents graduated from the university at Oxford, but was slow from the outset. He spent time with relatives and a nanny while his parents went to do relief work in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. They were helping to feed the children rendered hungry by the devastation of the war. When that ended, Piers and his sister joined them in Spain.

Piers left his native country at the age of four - and never returned. The new government of General Franco in Spain, evidently error-prone and suspicious of foreigners doing good works, arrested his father in 1940. They refused to admit that they had done so, making him in effect a "disappeared" person, but he was able to smuggle out a note. Then rather than admit error, they let him out on condition that he leave the country. World War II was then in progress, so instead of returning to England, they went to the U.S.

Because of this Piers Anthony has an abiding hostility to dictatorships.

Once his parents marriage fell apart, Pier's suffered from the consequences of separation from two countries and a broken family. He I showed an assortment of complications such as nervous tics of head and hands, bed-wetting, and inability to learn. It required three years and five schools to get him through first grade.

Piers Anthony has said "I later gained intellectual ground, but lost physical ground. When I entered my ninth school in ninth grade I was at the proper level but not the proper size, being the smallest person, male or female, in my class. However, boarding school, and later college, became a better home for me than what I had had, and I managed to grow almost another foot by the time I got my BA in writing at Goddard College, Vermont, in 1956. This was just as well, because I married a tall girl I met in college; I had to grow, literally, to meet the challenge."

Piers Anthony was discharged discharged from the Army in 1959. Both he and wife moved to Florida. After having suffered through cold winters in Vermont. He does not like cold winters. As a bonus they had family there as well as hilly country to remind him of mountains.

Piers had some fifteen jobs ranging from aide at a mental hospital to technical writer at an electronics company. In 1962 his wife agreed to work for a year so that he could stay home and try to write fiction full time. He ad to prove that he could sell something and support his family. He did sell two stories for $160. But that kind of success doesn't support your family so he became an English teacher. Not enjoying this profession he went back to writing in 1966.

Apparently progress was slow. A decade later he go into fantasy with A Spell for Chameleon the first in his Xanth series. Once that happened he was good to go. Piers wrote two other fantasy series The Adept series and Incarnations of Immortality.

Sales were good and Piers Anthony became one of the most successful writers of the genre, with twenty-one NEW YORK TIMES paperback bestsellers in the space of a decade. He now lives on a tree farm. This place even has wildlife. He is an environmentalist.

Since as Piers puts it that "a writer does not live by frivolous fantasy alone". He turned to serious writing. On history in novels like Tatham Mound, which relates to the fate of the American Indians. The Geodyssey series, covering man's past three and a half million years to the present. Volk (available via the Internet), which shows love and death in Civil War Spain and World War II Germany. Returning him to the area he left as a child.

Piers is writing a new, less frivolous fantasy series, ChroMagic, that begins with Key to Havoc. His biography to age 50, Bio of an Ogre, is now out-of-print. There is a sequel, How Precious Was That While. Piers Anthony has had more than 130 book published, with more on the way.

Quotes from Piers Anthony

"There has always been a serious side to my writing, even in my fantasy, and my readers respond to it. They tell me that I have taught many to read, by showing them that reading could be fun, and that I have saved the lives of some, by addressing concerns such as suicide. I take my readers as seriously as I take my writing, a number of them have become collaborators in a series of joint novels."
" In fact I am a workaholic, and I love my profession. I have, of course, an ongoing battle with critics, who see only the frivolous level; it is doubtful whether my work will ever in my lifetime receive much critical applause, but I believe in its validity for the longer haul. So do my readers".
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Partial Bibliography

Series

• Apprentice Adept
  1. Split Infinity (1980)
  2. Blue Adept (1981)
  3. Juxtaposition (1982)
  4. Out of Phaze (1987)
  5. Robot Adept (1988)
  6. Unicorn Point (1989)
  7. Phaze Doubt (1990)

• Aton
  1. Chthon (1967, his first published novel, nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards)
  2. Phthor (1975)

With Anthony's permission, Charles Platt wrote two further books in this series, Plasm (1987) and Soma (1988).

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