Name Don Berry Role Author | Died 2001 Education Reed College | |
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Awards Spur Award for Best Historical Novel Books Moontrap, To build a ship, Trask, A Majority of Scoundrels, Small Business Borrower | ||
Don George Berry (January 23, 1932 – February 20, 2001) was an American artist and author best known for his historical novels about early settlers in the Oregon Country.
He was born in Redwood Falls, Minnesota but moved to Oregon as a young man and came to think of himself as a native of that state. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. During college his housemates included the poet Gary Snyder, who shared Berry's interest in Eastern metaphysics.
In 1960, he published Trask, a historical novel about Elbridge Trask, an Oregon settler in the 1840s who was the first white homesteader on Tillamook Bay. He also wrote two other historical novels based on Oregon settlers Moontrap and To Build a Ship. His other works include A Majority of Scoundrels, a history of the fur trade in the Rocky Mountains. Besides writing, his lifelong artistic pursuits included bronze sculpture, sumi-e painting, and blues guitar playing.
Berry was also an early adopter of the use of the Internet for writing, creating a large body of literature that exists only in cyberspace.
He died in Seattle in 2001.