Merle Harton is a Quaker Christian writer, educator, and peace advocate—a "follower of the Way, which they call a sect" (Acts 24:14).

His experimental fiction has appeared in little press publications such as Back Porch, Paper Dance News, Satire, 69 Flavors of Paranoia, and elsewhere.  His first fiction collection, The Man Who Rowed Lake Pontchartrain and Other Stories, appeared in 2004. His new short-fiction collection, Twelve Stories from New Orleans [ISBN 978-0982430200] is now available from De Signis Press and from your favorite bookseller.

His nonfiction publications include works for historical and technical book and monograph audiences, in addition to scholarly essays and critical trade-book and software reviews.  His shorter nonfiction has appeared in BookScapes, the Jacksonville Business Journal, Computer Shopper, The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, inCider Magazine, Inside Technology Training, Orlando Sentinel, Philosophical Quarterly, Tulane Medicine, and elsewhere.  He is also co-author of the historical study Signor Faranta's Iron Theatre (New Orleans, 1982).

During a period in exile in New Orleans, he was successful in several careers: as Research Editor for a French Quarter museum, as Medical Alumni Director for Tulane University, as Business and Network Administrator for a large multi-group medical practice, and as Manager of Human Resources and Corporate Training for a private insurance company.  Later, midstream in another career (as campus dean at Florida Technical College, division dean at Herkimer County Community College, and academic dean at Everglades University), a colleague confessed to him that, because he had changed careers so many times, his co-workers thought perhaps he was a CIA operative—or else someone in the US Federal Witness Protection Program.

He received an honors B.A. in religious studies from the University of South Florida and both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy from McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada).  He also studied at Florida State University and the University of Iowa.  The son of celebrated WWII Marine Corps Master Sergeant Merle C. Harton, Sr., Merle (aka "J.R.") was born in DeLand, Florida, and obtained the majority of his pre-college education in military schools in Japan, Germany, Texas, and Washington, DC.

He taught technology management at SUNY Delhi and logic and philosophy at Edward Waters College, a private historically black college affiliated with the AME Church, in downtown Jacksonville, Florida; for nearly a decade he taught entrepreneurship and philosophy at New York's Herkimer County Community College, a unit of SUNY.  He is currently on the part-time philosophy faculty of Barry University and Nova Southeastern University in Florida.

Quite apart from studying Ontology with Gustav Bergmann, Plato with Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Symbolic Logic with Robert W. Beard, his most exciting accomplishment, he says, is having taught philosophy to several of the Lost Boys of Sudan while at Edward Waters College.

Merle is an evangelical Quaker Christian, in unity with Friends United Meeting (FUM).  He is single (divorced) with four children and now seven grandchildren. He is an avid surfer, cyclist, weight trainer, and a 2nd-degree black belt in Taekwondo.  More information about Merle is available here.