Howard Frank Mosher

Howard Frank Mosher was an American writer that wrote literary fiction set in the North East. Mosher was born in Kingston, New York to Helen Emily Trapp and Howard H. Mosher. He once referred to his hometown as a ghost town, a dying mill town where he spent most of his happy memories secluded behind his house catching trout from as early as four years. His father was a schoolteacher with wanderlust who moved the family more than ten times before Howard joined high school. However, the moving around had one silver lining; if they had never moved so much he would never have met his future wife in Cato, New York. Writing of his meeting with Phillis Claycomb he said that he was sitting in his school room one day when he looked up from his book to see a slender blonde with strawberry hair and a pretty face and the sweetest of smiles come through the door. From then on, the two would sit beside each other in their classes, and his early attempts at writing sarcastic stories about the teachers in his early adolescent years were meant to entertain Phillis. They both went to Syracuse University with Howard graduating with a bachelor in English, and Phillis with a bachelor in science education. They were married soon after graduation and got jobs in Orleans. In the meantime, Howard studied at the University of Vermont for his masters before moving west for a graduate program at the University of California Irvine. He hated it so much that he barely lasted three days before he drove back to Northern Vermont and the mountains he loved so much. He spent most of the following decade cutting pulpwood with Jake Blodgett a former whiskey smuggler and trout angler.