John Hunter Patterson (1955-1996) spent his childhood and youth
in Dublin, Georgia, where he developed strong interests in nature
and Native American history. As a teenager he began writing
seriously, and in 1977 he earned a bachelor’s degree in modern
languages from St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg,
North Carolina. He went on to earn a law degree from the University
of Georgia in 1985. Although he wrote prolifically for more than half
his life, he made his living researching land titles, and he chose to
let his irrepressible literary habit remain an avocation. His only
previous publications have been his chapbook, It Is Okay to Sleep
Now (Curveship Press, 1977) and several poems and short prose
pieces published in the 1970s and 1980s in small-edition literary magazines.
Having lived at various times in Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, Costa Rica,
and Montana, he spent most of his adult years in Atlanta,
where he died after a month-long illness brought on by side-effects from
chemotherapy drugs that are standard treatment for individuals diagnosed
with antibodies to HIV, as he had been in 1992. Written in his
last two years, The Banks of Hunger and Hardship is the only completed
novel among his surviving writings that include short stories, experimental
prose works, and several hundred poems.