Edward W. Schneider grew up in a Midwestern town on the fringe of the Detroit metropolitan area, the oldest of six children. Just as with Marion and Paul in Time After Time, his mother stayed home and his father was an elite engineer at a major auto supplier. Part of his youth was spent on a farm and part in the suburbs. Just as with John, he won a major mathematics competition and attended a large Midwestern university on a full scholarship, playing a non-money sport for four years while majoring in mathematics and English literature.

Academic success, sport, hard work and heavy physical labor were all integral to growing up in the Schneider household. His father and grandfather bought farms from immigrant Polish and German farmers whose children had opted for more modern occupations. They renovated the farmhouses, added running water, electricity and heating, built additions and modern basements, then sold the houses with a few acres for hobby farms and kept the land. It gave Edward the tools and the experience to carry out the same projects himself, and to write about them with authority.

Through a series of serendipitous events he found himself in financial services, working alongside some of the most notable executives of the last sixty years. It let him travel widely and meet a slew of enigmatic people, many of whom are distilled into the characters of this novel. The book describes the May 1976 Maine potato futures market, which ran from about five dollars per hundred pounds to nineteen fifteen and back to eight twenty-five when the Idaho growers defaulted on their short positions and destroyed the contract. Edward traded that market, and did well out of it.

Today Edward lives a short drive from the City of Cana, Utica, Michigan. Married fifty-two years, he and Fiona have four children, nine grandchildren and one misbegotten great-grandchild.