David Bradley

David Bradley was born in 1950 in Bedford, a small town in western Pennsylvania 'perilously close to the Mason-Dixon line'. The county had about a hundred black people in a population of thirty thousand. 'It was not that hospitable for blacks,' sys Bradley, 'or that comfortable'.
In 1968 Bradley went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he studied English and creative writing. He later was a post-graduate at King's College, London, and subsequently worked as an editor for a U.S. publisher.
Bradley's first novel, South Street, was published in 1975. The idea for The Chaneysville Incident goes back to 1969, when Bradley's mother, commissioned to research the history of Blacks in Bedford, discovered that there were thirteen unmarked graves on the property of a local landowner. A story that had always had the power of myth suddenly took on the force of fact.
David Bradley now teaches English at Temple University in Philadelphia.