Clyde McCulley was born in Benton, Arkansas in 1941, the last of six kids born to a father, sixty years old, and a mother of forty. Together, they tried to eke out a living on a five-acre farm with no running water and a two-holer outhouse. He was determined to go to college and pursue fine art, ultimately leading him to complete both an MFA and a doctorate in Higher Education Administration.

After working as a professor of art at several private colleges, McCulley spent twenty years as the director of the School of Art at Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute. McCulley's memoirs, "The Boy on Shady Grove Road," is a collection of 100 stories from his early years in the conservative segregated South of the 1940s and 50s. His book captures life on a little farm that was financially poor but rich in love, adventure, and imagination.

Along with humor that makes many readers laugh out loud are the tender, charming, and even poetic musings of a man who recalls a childhood with uncommon vividness. His characters and schemes in "The Boy on Shady Grove Road" brings back memories, to many readers, of Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn." McCulley's second books are a series "Panther Creek Mountain" McCulley lives with his wife, Susan, and their cat, Shadow, in Portland, Maine.