Richard Sharp confesses to being a member of the "Silent Generation," the subject of his current fiction writing. Born in the 1940s into a farming family who had migrated to rural Colorado from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, he traveled east as a young adult to receive degrees from Harvard and Princeton Universities. His writing is enriched from career experiences across America and in some four dozen countries, spanning the Vietnam War era through the present. Following years in the Washington, DC area, with assignments mainly in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the former Soviet Union, Mr Sharp now resides in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Duke Don't Dance is his third novel written for personal pleasure, but the first to be published. Sharp's preoccupation as a novelist is with tracing over time his protagonists' attitudes and emotions as they evolve with the changing culture of their generation - or, despite the advance of life, their stubborn adherence to spirits that served them well at critical junctures in their personal histories. Love may not be time's fool, as the sonnet reads, but those who populate his pages are fools in some respects, wise in others, but mostly tenacious in defending both inclinations. Sharp's characters are not static and they are neither heroes nor villains. His writing is based on the premise that few men or women can be solely one or the other over the decades, no matter how hard they try, but some may find redemption in the journey. Or, at least learn to be amused by it. Sharp's writing is sihnificantly influenced by the novels of Isabel Allende, who has a strong focus on the evolution of her protagonists over time and space over time and space. Other infouence rang from Josph Heller, through Bertolt Brecht and Oscar Wilde to the poetry of Jim Morrison, frontman of the Doors