Cliff Wilkerson lived on farms and in small towns while growing up in Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas. There in the Southwest he played at war against the Nazis in his grandparents’ farmyards, went to box suppers in rural schools, attended college and Oklahoma University medical school, and finished his adult psychiatric residency. Much of his inspiration for the stories in Beautiful Brown Eyes comes from knowing the people he lived or worked with in the 1930’s, ‘40’s and 50’s. Wilkerson now lives with his wife, Carolyn, in Chicago, Illinois where he practices child, adolescent and adult psychiatry and psychoanalysis.