Jim Dodge is the author of three novels - Fup, Not Fade Away and Stone Junction - and a collection of poetry and short prose, Rain on the River. He lived for many years on an isolated ranch in western Sonoma County and has been by turns an apple picker, a carpet layer, a teacher, a professional gambler, a shepherd for five years, a woodcutter and an environmental restorer.

I was a "wilderness educator" back in Texas in the mid-eighties . . . At night I used to read these tough, streetwise kids to sleep - Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, and a fable called Fup by Jim Dodge. They loved Fup in particular, a fable about a duck . . . I still hear from these kids - they're all over the country now and generally they're out of trouble, except for the fact that they might be reading Fup to their kids