Popeye, Unchained

M. G. Stephens (Michael Gregory Stephens) was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and further out on Long Island, into a family of sixteen children. His father came from Ireland and his mother was from an old New England family whose ancestors included a North African indentured servant to the Wheelock family, the founders of Dartmouth College. His mother grew up in a 27-room Brooklyn mansion on Madison near Stuyvesant, right where Spike Lee shot Do the Right Thing, which was also a few blocks from where Stephens lived as a child. He has been around boxing all his life. He also worked various jobs, including a stint in the Merchant Marine, greens-keeping, being a caddy, Christmas tree salesman on the Lower East Side, gas-pump jockey, dishwasher, East Asia correspondent, bartender, and of course journeyman boxer and sparring partner. He lived for many years (15) in London, but now resides just north of Chicago, and has been exiled from New York for over twenty-five years. Kid Coole is the third novel about the Coole family, the other two being The Brooklyn Book of the Dead and Season at Coole, whose fiftieth anniversary of its publication by E. P. Dutton is in 2022. These novels comprise The Coole Trilogy. Besides Kid Coole, Spuyten Duyvil has just published Stephens' novel, King Ezra, about Ezra Pound.