Thomas Alexander Boyd (1898-1935) was an American journalist and novelist born in Defiance, Ohio where he was raised by his mother's family as his father had died before he was born. While still in school, he and a friend enlisted in the US Marine Corps and saw service in France where he was gassed in 1918. Upon discharge from the occupation forces in 1919 Boyd tried several occupations before becoming a writer for newspapers in Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota. He went on to open a bookstore, Kilmarnock Books, in St Paul which became the focus of literary figures including Sinclair Lewis. Urged to write himself, in 1923 he published his first novel Through the Wheat, based in part on his own wartime experiences. Contemporary reviews compared it to The Red Badge of Courage and F Scott Fitzgerald called it "a work of art, " praising it in a review published in the New York Evening Post. Boyd later became interested in socialist causes during the Depression, eventually running as the Communist candidate for governor of Vermont. He died suddenly of a stroke in 1935.