D.N. Stuefloten was born in Redding, California in 1939, the son of Norwegian and German immigrants, and grew up in Hemet, then a farming community wast of Los Angeles.  He started writing at age nine and traveling at eighteen.  He has been a smuggler in Bombay, a black-market money changer in Ceylon, a seismic dynamiter on an oil-exploration crew in Australia, a fisherman in the South Seas, and a magician's assistant in East Africa.  He has wandered from place to place, living mostly hand-to-mouth, sleeping under bridges, often hungry, surviving because of a strong back and a quick eye for opportunity.  He was smuggled into Borneo by Moro pirates--their outrigger canoe had a machine gun in the bow--and has lived clandestinely in the Mayan ruins of Palenque.  He once spent nearly seven straight years in the United States, which he found terrifying.  His novels represent his attempt to describe the America he saw, to demolish it, artistically.  He now lives much of the time in Mexico.