This article examines the judicial writing of one of Michigan's finest writers. Born in 1903, John Donaldson Voelker lived virtually all of his 87 years in Ishpeming in the Upper Peninsula. He loved life in the U.P. and left only for three years of law school in Ann Arbor and three rather unhappy years practicing law in Chicago. He "didn't like living in the big city," (1) and felt "the very anonymity of city life is dangerous to the human animal." (2) During the long U.P. winters, Voelker wrote eighty articles and short stories, four novels, and seven other books. He joked that "if we had fishing all year round, I would never have written a book." (3) All of the books and almost all of the stories were authored under the pseudonym Robert Traver.
