Tony Hillerman was born in Oklahoma in 1925. He joined the US Army in 1943 and won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster and the Purple Heart after being wounded. After the war he attended the University of Oklahoma and worked as a journalist, eventually becoming editor of the New Mexican. In 1963 he went to graduate school at the University of New Mexico and joined the journalism faculty there in 1966. His first Navajo mystery, The Blessing Way, was published in 1970.
