George V. Simmons, born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1943, holds degrees in both classics and philosophy and has also done graduate work in theology. He has taught English and Latin at the secondary level in both public and private schools since 1968. He has resided for most of his life in Middleborough, Massachusetts. Although he produced a number of textbooks for use in his own classes over the years, Wanda Motherwell is his first novel. Written quickly as a kind of jeu d'esprit during an unanticipated upsurge of creativity in the summer of 1998, the book was published shortly thereafter in a small limited edition, for circulation among friends. They seemed to enjoy it, and now, through the publication of a second edition at Lulu.com, it has been made available to a wider audience. Simmons thinks of himself as writing within the tradition of Catholic social satire represented in Britain by Evelyn Waugh and in America by John Kennedy Toole and Flannery O'Connor.