Russell Martin is a lifelong resident of Colorado. He graduated in 1974 from The Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where he returns once each year to teach a course in creative nonfiction. He spent a postgraduate year on a Thomas Watson Foundation fellowship in Britain and Guatemala, then worked as a newspaper reporter in Telluride, Colorado for a number of years before becoming a freelance writer.

He is the author of Cowboy: The Enduring Myth of the Wild West (1983); Entering Space (co-authored with Joseph P. Allen, 1984), Matters Gray and White: A Neurologist, His Patients & the Mysteries of the Brain (1987); The Color Orange: A Super Bowl Season with the Denver Broncos (1987); A Story That Stands Like A Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West (1989), winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize; and the novel Beautiful Islands (1988). He edited two anthologies of contemporary western writing, Writers of the Purple Sage (1984) and New Writers of the Purple Sage (1992), and his highly acclaimed 1994 book, Out of Silence, was named by the Bloomsbury Review as one of fifteen best books of its first fifteen years of publication.

In the fall of 1995, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by his alma mater.

Comments from the Author

It was a short 1994 Associated Press article explaining that two Beethoven enthusiasts in Arizona recently had purchased a lock of Beethoven's hair, hoping to have it examined forensically for clues to his many illnesses, that first captured my attention. But soon it was the lock of hair's remarkable trip through time that truly engaged me and convinced me that I wanted to write a book on the subject.

My primary research took me to Vienna, Austria; Cologne, Germany; the Danish island of Sjaelland; Phoenix, Tucson, and Nogales, Arizona, and San Jose, California. Genealogical researchers in Gummersbach, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark, and Salt Lake City, Utah worked diligently on my behalf and helped uncover key pieces of information regarding the lock of hair's whereabouts, as well illuminating the lives of Ferdinand Hiller - who cut the lock of hair from Beethoven's corpse in 1827 - and his descendants. The Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Red Cross Tracing Service in Arolsen, Germany offered critical assistance, as did the Beethoven Haus in Bonn, and the Ira Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies in San Jose.

The key mysteries that the book addresses - who gave the lock of hair to Dr. Kay Fremming in the Danish fishing port of Gilleleje in October 1943, and why - readily held my fascination throughout the three years the book was underway. And my extensive research into those mysteries has left me in quiet awe of the collective effort of the Danish people in the autumn of that year not to allow the Nazis to deport the nation's Jews to concentration camps. The Danish rescue of more than 7,000 Jewish refugees is one of the most heroic events of World War II, and I am honored to have been able to recount that heroism in this book.

It was our nearly miraculous tracking down of the sole living heir of Ferdinand Hiller's family - a pulmonary therapist and mother of two sons who lives in Burbank, California - that gave me more pleasure than any other single discovery my researchers and I made along the way. It was simply extraordinary one day in July 1999 to hear her say, "Oh, yes, the lock of Beethoven's hair. I've heard stories about it so many times."

Those stories - and the many others that fill this book - have been my great pleasure to tell in Beethoven's Hair.

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