John Evangelist Walsh was born in Manhattan, New York on December 27, 1927. He enlisted in the Army and served in the infantry in Italy in the mid-1940s and as a reporter and photographer for military newspapers. When he returned home, he enrolled in Iona College, but before graduating he was hired as a reporter for The Oneonta Daily Star in upstate New York. It was the start of a career that took him to Prentice-Hall, Simon and Schuster, and Reader's Digest, where he headed condensed-book projects.

He wrote several books during his lifetime including Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, This Brief Tragedy: The Unraveling of the Todd-Dickinson Affair, and Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution. He was also the project editor on the condensation of the Reader's Digest Bible from 850,000 words to 510,000 words. He died on March 19, 2015 at the age of 87.

(Bowker Author Biography)