Frank Gelett Burgess was born in Boston in 1866. After getting a degree from MIT in 1887, he moved to California to teach at U. Cal Berkeley. While there, and later in New York and Paris, he wrote many humorous novels, poems and stories, many of which are still in print, including Goops and How to Be Them, More Goops and How Not to Be Them, and The Purple Cow. Burgess died in 1951 in Carmel, CA.