Berry Morgan (1919–2002) was born in Port Gibson, Mississippi. A mother of four children, she was active in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in the sixties, was later a cattle and organic farmer in West Virginia, and taught at George Washington University, among other schools. Of her planned trilogy Certain Shadows, the first two books were published during her lifetime, both by Houghton Mifflin. The first, a novel called Pursuit, appeared in 1966, and the second, a collection of stories titled The Mystic Adventures of Roxie Stoner, in 1974. All but one of the sixteen stories in this collection had been published in the New Yorker.