Donald Newlove was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, on March 28, 1928. As a reporter, book reviewer, and short story writer, his work appeared in Esquire, New York Magazine, Evergreen Review, and The Saturday Review. His first published novel, The Painter Gabriel (1970), was hailed by TIME Magazine as "one of the best fictional studies of madness, descent, and purification that any American has written since Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." The New York Times praised Sweet Adversity, his 1978 novel of alcoholic conjoined twin jazz musicians, calling it "one of the most desperately funny books we've been given in a long time." Newlove was the author of several other novels, a series of books on the art of writing, and the critically acclaimed memoir, Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers (1981). Newlove passed away on August 17, 2021.