Virgilio I. Gonzales was born in 1932 in the Philippines and grew up during the Japanese occupation in World War II. He has written and published how his family survived the war in his autobiography Waiting for General MacArthur. He studied and graduated with a chemistry degree from the University of the Philippines. He married a fellow chemist, Maria Corazon Jimenea, and they have three children — Arsenio, Leilani and Leo. In 1978 he emigrated to the United Sates and was employed by Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., who relocated his family from Manila to Danbury, Connecticut. Let Freedom Ring, his second book, is an affirmation of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave.