Vance dropped out of the University and, on what seems almost a whim, headed down to Pearl Harbor to work for the Navy as an electrician. An auspicious time for such a move! Given a miserable job there, he quit -- about a week before the Japanese attack. Back in the San Francisco area, he went to work building ships for the war effort. One critical offshoot of this adventure was a class taken in Japanese. Later on during the war, his experience with boats proved sufficient that he became a seaman, and spent the rest of the war on merchant ships -- though the cargo included, for example, soldiers bound for Australia, hence this too was part of the war effort. This phase of Vance's life is fairly well-known, as it was during the idle periods onboard (of which there are many, apparently) that he wrote his first successful stories, including those that became The Dying Earth.

Tired of the ocean, Vance took a job as a carpenter -- apparently as he was also starting to sell his stories. Having little to do on one job, he noticed a pretty girl in the neighboring house -- this was Norma, who was to become his wife. And before long -- partly with Norma's help, as Vance makes clear throughout the book how enthusiastically she supported his career, and how hard she worked -- he was selling stories regularly. From then on, writing was his only job.

He says little about his writing in the book, though occasionally he mentions the genesis or writing circumstances of one story or another. For example, he wrote "The Last Castle" for Fred Pohl at Galaxy because his agent had fouled up and sold a story twice, once to Pohl and then to another market. Vance remarks laconically "["The Last Castle"] turned out to be a pretty good story." He had a couple of ventures into other media -- he was paid fairly lavishly for a treatment and screenplay based on his early story "Hard Luck Diggings," which quickly came to naught when the producer involved was fired. And he spent some time working on the television series Captain Video.

After a time the Vances's life became peripatetic. They traveled widely, for long stretches of time, in Europe, in the Pacific, and elsewhere. Vance did plenty of writing on these trips. Then they would return to their home base in Northern California -- spending some time on a homebuilt houseboat. The wanderlust would strike again (or sufficient money would accumulate), and off they'd go. It seems a very fruitful sort of life for a writer, and explains much about the varieties of landscape and culture so central to Vance's fiction.

This is an easy-going narrative, generous throughout in its depiction of the people and places Vance encounters. Vance's life seems to have been mostly a good one, and he seems to take the hard times -- the early poverty, for example, or the more recent deafness -- quite in stride. Thus the book is pleasant throughout. A selection of photographs is included, and even finally a very brief chapter devoted to what little Vance cares to say about his writing career. It's a story that, as a fan of Jack Vance's writing, I am delighted to have finally been given the chance to read.