Richard Krause was born in New York City and lived in the Bronx until he was ten. He was then placed in Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, an orphanage where he lived in four homes with twenty other boys until he was seventeen; in the last two homes he performed household chores and milked cows. His father died when he was one.

Krause attended the local junior college in Hershey, Pennsylvania and then Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster. He went to graduate school at the University of Kansas and was drafted into the Army after receiving his degree. He was honorably discharged one year later as a conscientious objector. For five years he drove a taxi in New York City, and lived in Japan for nine years teaching at Tokyo Women’s College and Ibaraki University. He is retired from teaching at Somerset Community College. He has a wife and two children.