Thomas R. Beyer Jr was born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York where he attended Xaverian HS. He is a graduate of Georgetown University (1969) and the University of Kansas (1974). For the past 42 years he has been a Professor of Russian at Middlebury College in Vermont. He is the author of over a dozen books to learn Russian, and several translations of the Russian writer Andrei Bely. Considered an expert on Russian writers in emigration in Germany and the United States, Professor Beyer has lectured extensively in Russia, Germany and the United States. For the past few years he has offered seminars on the works of Dan Brown designed to permit students and readers separate fact from fiction. He has published revised and abridged versions of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov