P.B. MILLS

About

P.B. was named for his mother's father, a river pilot who could recite long stretches of Virgil in a translation no one in the family was ever able to identify. He was born in Helena, Arkansas, in a house that flooded twice before he was six, and was raised largely by his grandmother, who held that a child who could read did not require much further instruction.

His education was assembled from what happened to be at hand: a parish library with a classics shelf nobody had disturbed since the war, a correspondence Latin course completed badly and out of order, and a used book service that mailed him whatever it had too many of. He took a degree in accounting from a state university on the theory that numbers were the one subject that could not be argued with, and spent the following two decades learning that they could.

The work was insurance. Claims at first, then the reconstruction of events from paperwork prepared by people with reasons to shade it. He was good at it and cared for it less each year. He began writing at forty-three, having decided that the Roman historians had been in the same line of business he was, with fewer forms and better prose.

He lives in Nashville, and some part of each year in a borrowed apartment in Trieste. He keeps irregular hours and has never cared for the telephone.