David Nemec is a baseball historian, novelist, and playwright. He has published seven novels and authored or coauthored nearly forty books on baseball. His most acclaimed novels to date are Stonesifer, The Systems of M.R. Shurnas and Mad Blood. In addition to his novels, two of his stories have been selected for the Honor Roll of The Best American Short Stories. His most important baseball works have dealt with the game's embryonic years. In 1994 Lyons & Burford published The Rules of Baseball, an anecdotal look at the evolution of the rules of our national pastime.

The following year the same publisher brought out The Beer and Whisky League, a history of the American Association during its tenure as a rebel major league. In 1997 Donald I. Fine Books introduced Nemec's The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball. Nemec's first two books of his three-book series of biographies on every nineteenth century major league player, manager, regular umpire, primary owner and league officials-Major League Baseball Profiles, volumes 1 and 2-were published in September 2011 by the University of Nebraska Press. Nemec has received The Sporting News Research Award, playwrighting grants from the Impossible Ragtime Theater and the Huntington Playhouse, fellowships in creative writing, and numerous residency fellowships at the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Edward Albee Foundation. He has taught writing at the College of Marin, St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, and at prisons in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nemec's next scheduled publication is The Picture Maker, which begins on New Year's Day in 1978 when a convicted murderer meets a beautiful, mercurial and unhappily married poet while she gives a reading at Wallkill State Prison in New York where he is incarcerated.

Their turbulent love affair makes for both a taut story with frank sexual content and a compelling examination of the interior logic of a social outcast.