Ted Ross Hudson, author of The Lion’s Mouth Quartet, a series about the Western Theater of the American Civil War, was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Maryland a half-mile from the road down which John Wilkes Booth fled after assassinating Abraham Lincoln. He went to secondary schools named for the Surratt family that was involved in the assassination conspiracy. In the 1890s, his great-grandfather Hudson lived in a rooming house across the street from Ford’s Theater next door to the House Where Lincoln Died. The Civil War is in his blood.

After law school, he worked for the Bureau of Land Management, Department of the Interior, mostly writing regulations for managing the public domain lands of the American West.

In the late ‘90s, he investigated family history. A cousin sent two 1863 letters by paternal great-grandfather Frederick Stuart Wileman, Civil War soldier.

One included the postscript that became the epigraph for Volume Two of The Lion’s Mouth Quartet: “…I had my fourth of July at the Battle of Murphreesboro. I think it was equal to Van Amberg’s maneuvres.”   Isaac Van Amburgh (1811-1865) was a pre-eminent wild animal trainer, most famous for his ‘maneuver,’ putting his head in the lion’s mouth. This inspired the writing.

Ted and his wife LiPing have two children, Miranda and Lachlan, and Miranda has two daughters, Alanna, 2½, and Eliza, 6 months.