Dennis McCown

Dennis McCown was born in Wyoming, the Cowboy State. He grew up in Cheyenne, in the heart of the Old West and went to school at the University of Wyoming. (Go Cowboys!) Though he has traveled and worked overseas for years and worked at the Air Force Academy too, he settled in Texas, where he was a college instructor in Adult Education. "Many of my students' harsh life experiences are similar, actually, to what happened to Helen Beulah Mrose, The Goddess of War," he has said. Indeed, McCown felt the parallels between our time and the Old West so similar, he researched them intensively. "People have not changed at all," he says. "We have a different culture and technological benefits, but how our grandparents and great-grandparents lived their lives is exactly how we live ours." In fact, as a result of his work on "The Goddess of War," McCown has a theory that the scandal of one person's mistakes impacts their descendants for at least three generations. To explain this, McCown paraphrases an old cowboy, "History is like molasses. You can't pour it all out; some sticks to the cup."