Meet the Author
Discover the author whose passion brings extraordinary books to life – a glimpse into Gentry's captivating world.
I was born and raised in Liberty, Missouri. My greatest love growing up was playing football. My family moved to San Diego, California in 1956, but I returned to Liberty to play football and graduate from Liberty High. During my succeeding college years and thereafter I have been absorbed with reading and thinking about the subjects of philosophy, psychology, and religion, among many others.
After graduating from college and before entering the U.S. Army in early 1964 I spent the summer working at selling Great Books of the Western World cold canvass door to door and was honored as the most prolific junior salesman. I was then drafted into the Army and completed Basic Training at Fort Ord, California. From there I went to Fort Benning, Georgia where I completed Officer Candidate School (OCS) and Airborne Training (parachuting/jump school). After completing active duty at Fort Ord I was employed by Washington Inventory Service as a Management Trainee, then served as a Branch Manager in their Hayward, California office.
I worked for WIS for approximately two years, then attended graduate school at San Diego State University where I completed a Master’s Degree in English Literature. My academic background has included graduation from William Jewell College (B.A. in Liberal Arts: Economics and Philosophy); Army Officer Candidate School and Airborne Training; San Diego State University (M.A. in English Literature); and Northern Illinois University (Graduate Assistant in English Literature–where I taught Freshman Literature and Composition). After leaving graduate school at NIU I sought employment at Community Colleges in California and discovered they were hiring persons with Ph. D. degrees or otherwise those with more extensive teaching experience.
Subsequently, I worked as an Administrative Assistant with The City of San Diego in their Engineering Department. I worked with the City for several years, then moved on to other employments before starting my own window cleaning business in 1984. That employment supported my living for four and one-half years before I commenced teaching, at the secondary school level, for the Los Angeles Unified School District from 1988 to 2011. I taught all six grade levels, 7 through 12, including Honors courses and Advanced Literature and Advanced Composition at Thomas Jefferson High School. My published works include my Master’s Thesis “The Metamorphosis of Nick Adams” (an analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s first major literary character); “Rogues’ Gallery” (a study of the relevance of Greek Mythology to contemporary life and living); and “Existential Ruminations” (reflections on existence and eternity, truth and reality, God, religion and the supernatural, self and others, and character, love and vision). At my retirement from teaching in Los Angeles I returned to my original hometown of Liberty, Missouri where I have resided since.
For the past several years I have composed the poemographs of “Existential Ruminations” (ER) published in 2022 (and slightly revised in 2023).That work incorporates reflections on experiences I endured during the 1970s–most especially a reversal of traveling in August of 1979 which I acknowledge was a literal miracle. The balance of ER encompasses reflections on my readings in philosophy, psychology, and religion (among other subjects) over the past six-plus decades. The preponderance of that thinking focused on the subjects of God, love, death, the reliability of scriptures, and a possible future life in Eternity. My decades of reading in the “forest of doubt” and my miracle experience have moved me from being a hardcore atheist to a puzzled believer in God’s reality and the possibility of life after death.