Herbert Lobsenz
Lobsenz’s father, born in Manhattan before there were electric lights or subways, heard first hand tales of the Civil War and the unsettled west from family members. He got his medical degree in 1912, practiced medicine for fifty-one years, served in the medical corps during WW I, played cards and the horses with Theodore Dreiser, Henry Mencken and SS Van Dine.
All that gave Herb Lobsenz a sense of history, a respect for literature, and the desire to write. He studied literature at Heights College, NYU, went into the army during the Korean War and, following Robert Jordan of For Whom The Bell Tolls, became an EOD specialist. After his discharge, he spent five years in Europe on the GI Bill studying at the Universities of Madrid, and Perugia and at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He read Hemingway, Tolstoy, Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen, and the King James Bible and wrote two novels.
The second, Vangel Griffin (1961), was picked out of the Harper Brothers slush pile, won the Harper Prize, appeared on the Times best seller list, was reprinted in paperback by NAL, in England by Secker & Warburg. His short fiction appeared in Mademoiselle, Paris Review, Antioch Review and other magazines. While writing another novel based on the Civil War, he got married and started a family.
His Civil War novel wasn’t published and short on money, with a growing family, he stopped writing and took jobs in the office equipment business and in educational publishing before founding Market Data Retrieval (MDR) in 1969. During twenty-eight years as CEO of MDR, his family grew to six children, he was elected to office five times, but he didn’t write. He sold MDR to Dun and Bradstreet (D&B), became CEO of D&B’s Debt Collection business while continuing as head of MDR, until one day he decided to retire from all that and go back to what he truly wished to do—write books.
>> READ ABOUT HERB'S PREVIOUS NOVEL: Vangel Griffith