George Joseph Benet was born in Chicago on May 27, 1918. He joined the Army just before WWII and served throughout the war. Afterwards, Benet moved to California where he married Camille Gage Morris, a rare book dealer in San Francisco. He then moved back East to Greenwich Village in 1952, where he wrote The Hoodlums, published under the pseudonym of John Eagle, selling a half a million copies. Later that decade Benet moved back to San Francisco, where he worked as a longshoreman and was a life-long member of the ILWU. He eventually got a masters from U.C. Berkeley and started writing again in the 1970s, producing two well-received works before he passed away on October 9, 1990.