Richard Panchyk knew he wanted to be a writer by the time he was seven years old. He made his first sale, a four-page handwritten trivia booklet written on a folded piece of loose-leaf paper in runny blue ink, to a third-grade classmate for a nickel. A native of Elmhurst, Queens, Richard attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, where he took a class on the history of New York, and has been fascinated by the area's past ever since. He printed a small book of his poems at the age of nineteen and published his first book at the age of twenty-one. Since then he has published twenty-seven books, for a total of more than three thousand pages, including five titles on Long Island's history and seven titles on New York City's history.