Author Biography for GENE EDWARDS

The dyslexic and colorblind son of an illegitimate oil field worker, Gene Edwards went on to become one of the most influential Christian authors of the twentieth century.

On July 17, 1949, the day before his seventeenth birthday, Gene had, as he describes it, “a head on collision with Christ” on the backseat floorboard of a 1934 Chevrolet. After graduating from college at the age of eighteen, Gene went to seminary in Europe. He spent a summer tracing the journeys of the Apostle Paul through the Holy Lands, hitchhiking his way across the Mediterranean. “The danger of hitchhiking in nations at war, six of which hated Americans at the time, did not occur to me until years later,” he remembers. Returning to Europe, Gene lived in Rome for a time, where he spent his twentieth birthday doing research at the Vatican.

At the age of twenty-one, Gene married Helen Rogers—on national television. NBC had a program in those days called “Bride and Groom.” Couples with interesting love stories were invited on to tell their stories, and were then married before 6 million television viewers.

Gene grew up in a man’s world—“a tough, brawling, no-nonsense, unpretentious world of oil field roughnecks.” He was profoundly impacted by the simple of these rough-hewn, often illiterate people, and felt a deep disconnect between that simple faith, and the faith of the early Christians he saw in the pages of scripture, and the formality and, often, the luke-warm he saw in the institutional protestant . Most of his books are written in simple language, helping simple people connect with God. “I write books on about a fourth grade level,” he quips, “the same level I do mathematics!”

Gene is the author of over thirty Christian books, the best known of these being The Divine Romance, A Tale of Three Kings, and The Prisoner in the Third Cell. His books have been published in more than seventy foreign editions and in twenty-two languages. In 2011 he published Living Close to God (When You’re Not Good At It): A Spiritual Life That Takes You Deeper Than Daily Devotions (WaterBrook Multnomah). He holds a B.A. in English literature and history from East Texas State University and an M.Div from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Gene holds conferences around the country on the deeper Christian life and is part of the movement. He lives with his wife Helen in Florida.

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