Biography
Tom Bradley was born in Utah during a time when of hydrogen bomb tests were still performed aboveground. In later life, he lived in the People's Republic of China for many years and lost friends in the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
The author has stated that as an unintended victim of US nuclear testing, he gravitated to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where he has written strident criticisms of the Japanese educational system In the opinion of Israeli journalist Barry Katz, who writes for 3:AM Magazine in Paris, Tom Bradley deliberately courts controversy: "He does seem bent on leaving absolutely nobody unpissed-off. His venom’s no less ecumenical than gratuitous." Rain Taxi Review of Books expresses the notion as follows: "As proof of his leaving no one un-offended, he's been nudged out of every university where he has taught. For the past two decades he has lived the life of an ex-pat laugh assassin, tucked away in a volcanic mountain on the island of Kyushu".
However, in composing the Critical Appendix for Fission Among the Fanatics, Advocate writer Cye Johan arrived at a different conclusion: "I tell you that Dr. Bradley has devoted his existence to writing because he intends for every center of consciousness, everywhere, in all planes and conditions (not just terrestrial female Homo sapiens in breeding prime), to love him forever, starting as soon as possible, though he's prepared to wait thousands of centuries after he's dead".
He claims paternal descent from Mormon handcart pioneers who were excommunicated almost immediately upon arriving in Deseret, from whom he inherited his "whole hefty metabolism" and his remarkable height. 3:AM Magazine describes him as "sociopathically tall." He also claims to have descended maternally from an earlier Nagasaki expatriate, Thomas Blake Glover.
Regarding the question of the extent to which his fictional alter-ego, Sam Edwine, is autobiographical, Tom Bradley has written that while the character is more intelligent and has had a great variety of experiences that he has not, they are essentially alike.
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“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)