Jonathan Aurthur was born in New York City in 1948 and attended St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, and the University of California, Los Angeles, where he majored in motion pictures. In the late 1960s through the early 1980s, he worked as a community organizer and documentary filmmaker. He was also the editor of a journal of political theory called Appeal to Reason and the author of a book on political economy called Socialism in the Soviet Union. He currently lives in Santa Monica, California, and by profession is a proofreader and copyeditor, as well as a writer. Aside from his late son, Charley, he has a surviving daughter, Jenny.