Joseph Paul Lee was born in Morocco into a naval family and has lived across Europe and the United States. After studying management information systems in the Midwest, he settled in Chicago, where he works as a technical product manager. He is the author of a business book on product management leadership, and Always, Henry is his first novel. He outlined most of the story thirty years before writing it. Once the draft was finished, he spent nearly a year refining it with an editor, later designing the cover and interior himself.
Joseph writes in plain, unhurried, spare prose—a deceptively challenging style. He trusts readers to visualize and understand a scene's emotion and implication without over-embellishing his sentences. He draws inspiration from writers who mastered this minimalist approach, including John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, and Ernest Hemingway.