Stanley B. Alpern served in the US Navy in 1944-46, received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1947, and completed a master's degree at Columbia University. After six years as a New York Herald Tribune copy editor and twenty-two years with the US information Agency, including five in Africa, he retired to France in 1977 to write about precolonial West Africa. He is the author of Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey.