John Franklin Bardin (1916–1981)

John Franklin Bardin was born in Cincinnati in 1916. After an unhappy childhood he left the University of Cincinnati in his first year to find a full-time job. He became a ticket-taker and bouncer at a local roller-skating rink and educated himself by working at night, reading and clerking in a bookstore. He moved to New York near the age of thirty, and served as an executive at an advertising agency for nearly twenty years. In addition to his various journalistic endeavors, he taught advertising and creative writing at the New School for Social Research from 1961 to 1966. He is the author of ten novels. He died in 1981.