About the Author

John Austin Moore was born in Rochester, New York in 1912, the first child of Glenn Culver and Harry Austin Moore. In 1927 the Moores moved to Elkhart, Indiana. While there, John spent eight summers working in South Bend, Indiana and at YMCA Camp Eberhart in Three Rivers, Michigan. He earned a BA and MA from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and served a few years in the Merchant Marine.

In 1942, preferring not to be drafted, John attempted to enlist in the Navy. At first he was rejected because of a deformed foot and color blindness. But eventually he was accepted as an officer. While home on leave, he met Ruth Martin, also of Elkhart. They corresponded and eventually married in Clinton Oklahoma.

After his discharge from the Navy, John wanted to support himself writing. To do this he felt he needed both seclusion and an experience to write about. He and Ruth selected a remote promontory on Dog Lake near Missanabie and there they built their home in the wilderness. After living there for three years John was unable to sell the two books he had completed and Ruth was pregnant with their second child. They had to abandon the idea of living permanently in the Ontario wilderness. John taught English for the next five years at Wayne State University in Detroit but they still summered at Dog Lake. John taught one year at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana and then bought 40 acres of Indiana farmland where he planted hardwood timber as a long term investment crop. Part of a summer at Dog Lake in 195... convinced them that they could not leave their farm in Indiana untended so they sold the house.

John wrote a few magazine articles, sold garden produce, worked as a farm laborer and lived very frugally. He died of cancer in 1977.

Although the house on Dog Lake now belongs to a tourist outfitter, it remains very much like it was when John Moore first built it. John's daughter Dian spends part of her vacation at a resort on Dog Lake not far from the original home she loved so much.