Mr. Trent is retired after working many years in consulting and eventually owning his own company developing, selling, and installing unique software to the utility industry in the United States and Canada. He currently lives in Florida like the majority of senior citizens in the US. He grew up as a very poor white child with a divorced mother. He started working when he was ten and some years ago he decided to write Lonely Island based on his experiences delivering newspapers during the mid 1950s to an all black community in segregated central Virginia.