Howard Blue, the author of WORDS AT WAR, has lived most of his life on Long Island where he taught high school Social Studies for 32 years. His interest in the Golden Age of Radio was revived while listening to BBC radio drama every evening during a 1973 sabbatical leave in London. While teaching, he involved his students in interviewing witnesses to history, including a cousin of Ann Frank, a former German World War I U-boat sailor, and a local veteran of the Spanish Civil War. To enable his students to interview a Canadian World War I veteran of trench warfare and the copilot of the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, both of whom lived far from Long Island, he set up telephone interviews using a speakerphone.

Blue is fluent in Russian and speaks some Polish, Spanish and German. His translations of two stories: including one by Leo Tolstoy have been published in an anthology of Russian literature. In 1982, a sabbatical brought Blue to Warsaw where one afternoon, he got a strong dose of tear gas during a political demonstration. Four years later, he spent a summer in Israel participating in a Fulbright program for teachers, which had him hiking on the Negev Desert, listening to speakers from a cross-section of Israeli society, and writing a study about the political future of the West Bank. In 1989, Blue found himself teaching in a Soviet high school in Moscow on a semester long exchange. When a friend invited Blue to the funeral of human rights activist, Andrei Sakharov, but police tried to severely limit the number of mourners, Blue passed through a checkpoint by flashing his American public library card. In 1991, again in Moscow, Blue was an eyewitness to the coup attempt which resulted in the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Blue's first major writing project was a Masters thesis about former Soviet Cold War leader Nikita Khrushchev. Ironically, thirty years later he was able to donate a copy of it to a scholarly institute at Brown University, headed by Khrushchev's son. Blue's genealogical research resulted in his reuniting relatives in Russia with whom there had been no contact for 60 years, with his family in the U.S. In the 1970s, he established the first Amnesty International group in an American high school. Blue also served as a board member of Amnesty's American affiliate and he wrote an unpublished history of the human rights organization.

Blue originally planned WORDS AT WAR as an anthology of World War II propaganda radio, from four countries: Britain, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. He did some research in Moscow and in the BBC archives in Reading, England. But he changed the book's focus when he realized both how much American material there was and that there would be greater interest in a history of radio drama.

Blue is married to Deborah Goldberg, a Biology, Chemistry, and Forensic Science teacher. He married her despite the fact that when they first met, she was immersed in a study of serial killers and she scared the hell out of him. Blue has three daughters from a previous marriage.