Edward P. Cummings resides in North Texas.  A journeyman welder for more than thirty years, BEHIND THE IVY took over a decade to complete and is the first accomplished work of fiction by the author.

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I was born in California in 1958.  My grandparents, on my father’s side, were from Oklahoma and they came to the San Joaquin Valley during the Great Depression looking for work—a life very similar to that in THE GRAPES OF WRATH—as I can attest by the photographs I have and the stories my mother told.

My grandfather, on my mother’s side, was a member of the Irish Republican Army.  Born in 1900, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, he came to the U.S. in 1918, working as a subway engineer for the City of New York.  He moved to Chicago a few years later, where he met my grandmother and settled down.

As for me, the son of migrant farm workers, I’m half Irish with Scottish and Native American blood—Chickasaw and Cherokee.  My father started a country & western band when I was very young.  Unfortunately, playing music in a number of taverns and honky-tonks got the best of him.  He became an abusive alcoholic and I left home at age sixteen.

I did a lot of reading to escape those painful years when my father drank.  I was in the fifth grade when I ran across a copy of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee.  It was my first crack at a real novel and Lee inspired me, along with Steinbeck, Hemingway, Bradbury, and E.B. White—just to name a few—to write something as meaningful and enjoyable as they did.

As to my past accomplishments, I have one noteworthy collection of poetry to my credit and a response from President Reagan in regard to the collection.  I took Theater Arts in high school, Creative Writing in college and I’ve been a welder for over thirty years.

There will be a sequel to THE FALLING REIGN entitled A DESPERATE AGE.  My next book, THE ROCK FINDER, is an inspirational drama about a female sculptor who takes stock of her life following a near death experience.