David Eddings

David Carroll Eddings was an American fantasy writer. With his wife Leigh, he authored several best-selling epic fantasy novel series, including The Belgariad (1982–84), The Malloreon (1987–91), The Elenium (1989–91), The Tamuli (1992–94), and The Dreamers (2003–06). Eddings was born in Spokane, Washington, to George Wayne Eddings and Theone (Berge) Eddings, in 1931. Eddings has stated that he is part Cherokee.

Eddings grew up near Puget Sound in the City of Snohomish. After graduating from Snohomish High School in 1949, he worked for a year before majoring in speech, drama, and English at junior college. Eddings displayed an early talent for drama and literature, winning a national oratorical contest and performing the male lead in most of his drama productions. He graduated with a BA from Reed College in 1954, writing his first novel, How Lonely Are The Dead, as his senior thesis. 

After graduating from Reed College, Eddings was drafted into the U.S. Army after graduating from Reed College, having also served in the National Guard. After being discharged in 1956, Eddings attended the graduate school of the University of Washington in Seattle for four years, graduating with an MA in 1961 after submitting a novel in progress, Man Running, for his thesis.

Eddings then worked as a purchaser for Boeing, where he met his future wife, then known as Judith Leigh Schall. They married in 1962, she taking the name Leigh Eddings, and through most of the 1960s, Eddings worked as an assistant professor at Black Hills State College in South Dakota. David and Leigh Eddings adopted one boy in 1966, Scott David, then two months old. They adopted a younger girl between 1966 and 1969.

In 1970 the couple lost custody of both children and were each sentenced to a year in jail in separate trials after pleading guilty to 11 counts of physical child abuse. According to the Black Hills Weekly, on February 11, 1970, the couple's four-year-old adopted child was found in the pitch-black basement of their home, locked in a cage, wearing nothing but a tee shirt. The child had been physically abused with a heavily swollen and disabled hand with scrapes, heavy bruising about his body, and evidence of prior beatings. 

Investigators during the trial noted that there were restraints on the walls, no lighting, and a strong smell of cat urine in the basement. Though the abuse, the trial, and the sentencing were all extensively reported in South Dakota newspapers at the time, these details did not resurface in media coverage of the couple during their successful joint career as authors, only returning to public attention several years after both had died. After both served their sentences, David and Leigh Eddings moved to Denver in 1971, where David found work in a grocery store.