Meet the Author, Ray White
 

Ray White is a freelance writer and retired history professor who is an authority on western stars Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and on low-budget western movies that they and other cowboy stars made in the 1930s and 1940s. The University of Wisconsin Press published his book, King of the Cowboys, Queen of the West: Roy Rogers and Dale Evans in September of 2005. He has also published essays on Roy and Dale and low-budget westerns in several books dealing with American popular culture. He has written articles for Western Horseman, American Cowboy, The Horseman's Pro-Am News, Favorite Westerns, Indiana Libraries, The History Teacher, Progressive Farmer, and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. His first book, Fifty Years of Beneficence: The Ball State University Foundation, 1951-2001, appeared in print in 2001.

Ray grew up in the small south Texas towns of Luling, Beeville and Goliad. After graduating from Texas State University in San Marcos, he attended the University of Texas, Austin, where he earned masters and doctoral degrees in American history. He taught in colleges in Texas, Missouri and Indiana for nearly forty years, retiring in 1996 as chair of the history department at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. At Ball State he taught American frontier history and, for eighteen years, a course on the history of the low-budget western movie. He is currently researching a book on movie producer Paul Malvern.

Ray and his late wife Kay moved to Muncie in 1967. He has two children and four grandchildren.