I suppose one faces a charge of egocentricity when adding a bio treatment to one's website, and yet many readers are interested in an author's background as a guide to evaluating the work he produces. So...

I was born a patriot, I suppose, and an optimist, endowed with deep love of country -- and with a vast curiosity about my fellow man. You'll find all these qualities shaping what has become my lifework, the novels of history I call The American Story.

Start with youth on military posts in the old army, here and abroad. Flags and parades and the sunset gun, patriotism overflowing. Curiosity and patriotism led me first to war and then to journalism in the sense that the true journalist seeks to serve his community. So I began on Texas dailies and then on the old Life Magazine in its glory days as a weekly when it was one of the world's great publications. As a national journalist optimism made me see the country's glories even as I worked amidst its faults. But in that process I also came to see that what mattered to me was less the news than the story behind the news, the human story. When I turned to history that still was what I cared about. Telling what happened, what mattered, in terms of men and women who made the history, seeing and feeling as they did the events that shaped the country as it swept from the Atlantic seaboard to its continental stretch and laid the groundwork for the stunning nation that it is today.

I went to Texas in a wicker basket from Washington D.C. when I was two weeks old which I felt made me a Texan. My father, a veterinary officer when the horse cavalry was dying, was posted around the country and in Manila, which I still remember with joy. I wrote my first story there on, naturally, a heroic veterinarian. And life in the old army gave me the feel for the pre-technological military that you find in my books today.

As a boy-volunteer in the navy I caught the end of World War II, Pacific theater, and then went on to several years as a deep water sailor on merchant vessels, writing constantly and selling nothing. Bounced through several colleges -- a desultory student to say the least -- and turned to a first love, newspapers. Early choices shape us so -- I threw a newspaper route in a very tough section of Shreveport, Louisiana when I was twelve and from the first day the smell of the ink, the feel of the paper, the wealth of stories that unfolded before one's eyes told me that here, somehow, is where I belonged. I still do belong in stories.

So I went newspapering on the Mexican border at Brownsville, Texas, covering police and the Border Patrol and the Texas Rangers, and covering the hardship and poverty and the striking spirit of folks across the Rio Grande. That led in time to metropolitan dailies and that led to covering Texas for Time and Life and that led to appointment as correspondent and staff writer and now I was working on the great national stories that shook the country -- the glorious civil rights movement that stirred the nation's conscience and changed it forever, the Cuban missile crisis when I flew to the coast of Cuba in a Grumman Goose for pictures of a Russian freighter with missiles on deck being turned back by an American destroyer, the terrible day in Dallas when President Kennedy was assassinated. And I plunged into national politics, covered House and Senate, did stories from the White House, all the while gathering grist for the insights you see in my books today which are about, after all, the same things in a different era.

Life Magazine died in time, victim of evolution and change, and like old soldiers, journalists often find it's time to move on. I moved on to a dozen popular histories in various Time-Life Books series. They weren't great books, fixed to a set pattern as they were, but they were oriented to story and to people and they gave me an education in the history of the United States.

Out of that I learned vital lessons. I learned that the democracy we see today as natural was in fact a tender flower, standing alone in the world at the beginning. It holds today because generations of men and women have nurtured it, defended it and seen it grow strong. And I saw that this was a story I wanted to tell, partly because I think we need to be reminded today but mostly because it is a terrific story.

But I didn't want to tell it as history, anchored to facts and documents -- I wanted to tell it as story that unfolded the humanity that lay behind the great events. Years ago I dreamed of the perfect journalistic story, a you-are-there treatment that a fly on the wall might render were he a journalist and not a fly. So I conceived what I came to call the imagined inside story of a known outside story.

The result was my first novel, DREAM WEST, a Book of the Month Club Main Selection, a New York Times best seller, a 7-hour miniseries on CBS starring Richard Chamberlain -- AND a book that has been brought back to print and is in stores once again. It tells the story of John Charles Fremont and his wife Jessie Benton Fremont and the opening of the Oregon Trail in the 1840s.

Out of this came the determination to cover the whole period, 1800 to 1860 when democracy was born and prospered and came to the point that it was tested by fire and survived. Next came the novel I called simply 1812, which tells the story of Dolley and James Madison fighting the second war with Britain, the coming-of-age war that determined once and for all that democracy would hold and the United States would take its place in the family of nations.

Next, EAGLE'S CRY stepped back in time to the period's start when the Louisiana Purchase set the nation on a continental path and gave the first powerful lift to modern democracy. Hard on this book's heels comes TREASON, now surging in bookstores as a Forge hardcover, telling the story of Aaron Burr's desperate effort to regain his lost future by shattering the new democracy and stealing half the nation -- and the way James and Dolley Madison stopped him.

The fifth novel, MERIWETHER, on the magnificent Lewis and Clark Expedition, will be published in late 2002. And, God willing, the series will go on telling its great story.

e-mail David Nevin