In The Company of Educated Men
About this ebook
About the author
Leonce Gaiter now lives in Northen California, having firstly moved to Los Angeles to work in the creative and business ends of the film and music industries. However, describing himself as a ‘quintessential army brat—rootless, restive, and disagreeable’, his childhood was spent in a variety of locations, including New Orleans, Washington D.C., Missouri, Maryland and Germany. He began writing early in life and continued after graduating from Harvard, but in one post on the Internet speaks of the difficulty of breaking into the publishing mainstream. His novels had ‘black main characters inhabiting overwhelmingly white worlds’. However, they were not historical in the required sense – not being about slavery, or the civil rights movement – and so were outside of what publishers were wanting, causing initial rejection and some frustration. His fictional writing centres on the extraordinary; characters who are larger than life who demand more and of whom more is demanded than those living a somewhat more staid and ordinary domestic existence, albeit with their own petty dramas. Being highly versatile, Gaiter has had non-fiction published in most of the heavyweight US newspapers, including the ‘New York Times’, ‘Los Angeles Times’, ‘The Washington Times’, and ‘The Washington Post’. In addition, he has written a short story, but finds the form not really to his liking, a noir thriller, and historical fiction. His novel ‘In the Company of Educated Men’ started life as a screenplay many years ago, but has now been turned into an acclaimed novel. Whilst highly talented as a writer, he states that a lingering resentment he has is ‘not having been born with the talent to play jazz’.