Dennis Vannatta, author of The Care and Feeding of the True Duffer: A Guide to Golf in the Real World, has spent the bulk of his career as a college professor and writer.

Vannatta was born in Appleton City, Mo., and spent most of his formative years in Sedalia, Mo., where he discovered and fell in love with golf at Elm Hills Golf Course, a glorified cow pasture with sand greens.

Despite his love affair with golf, Vannatta was fortunate enough to have other aptitudes—and perceptive enough to realize that he needed them—and subsequently received a bachelor's degree from Central Missouri State University and both his master's and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in Columbia.

Before a two-year stint in the Army, Vannatta taught high school in Missouri. Since 1978 he has been an English professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he specializes in contemporary literature.

Vannatta has been writing almost as long as he has been playing golf. Early in his career, he concentrated on literary criticism, writing four books—Nathanael West: An Annotated Bibliography of the Scholarship and Works; H.E. Bates; The English Short Story, 1945-1980: A Critical History, and Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction—and dozens of essays in journals and reference works. He later switched to his true love, creative writing, and since then has written three collections of short stories—This Time, This Place, Stories; Players for the Dead: Stories, and Lives of the Artists: Stories—and dozens of stories and creative essays in journals and anthologies. He was awarded a Pushcart Prize for the short story in 1991.

The Care and Feeding of the True Duffer is his first book about golf. Vannatta and his wife, Patti, live in Little Rock, Ark., where their golf companions include his son, Matt, and daughter, Christine.