John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) was born in Mansfield, Texas. His early training was as a musicologist in Tours, France specializing in Gregorian Chant. He studied psychology, specializing in the effects of music on the mentally disturbed. He also studied photography and became an expert portrait photography.

During WWII he help Jews in France escape the Nazis. After the fall of France, he joined the U. S. Army Air Corps and was sent to the South Pacific to work with the native islanders. Injured by a bomb blast he gradually lost his sight, becoming totally blind by 1947. During his blindness he wrote his two major novels The Devil Rides Outside and Nuni as well as numerous short stories. In 1951 he became a Roman Catholic. After recovering his sight in 1957, he wrote for Sepia magazine and in 1959 he wrote a series of articles for Sepia magazine based on his travels through the Deep South as a "black" man. This series was published as Black Like Me in 1961.

In 1969 he was appointed the Official Biographer of Thomas Merton. Throughout his life he wrote and lectured widely on race relation and social justice. He died in 1980 at the age of sixty.