Henry Alley (born 1945) grew up in Seattle, Washington, and studied at Stanford University from 1963 to 1967, with a major in English literature and a minor in classics. He wrote his honors thesis on characterization in Milton. After graduating, he attended Cornell University from 1967 to 1971, receiving his MFA in fiction writing and his PhD in prose fiction. After a year of working at Tompkins County Hospital (1972), he went on to teach as a professor at the School of the Ozarks (1972–75), the University of Idaho (1975–82), and in the Robert D. Clark Honors College (1982–2016) of the University of Oregon, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor of Literature.
He has five novels: Through Glass (1979), The Lattice (1986), Umbrella of Glass (1988), Precincts of Light (2010) and Men Touching (2019). Chelsea Station Editions published his short story collection, The Dahlia Field (2017). He is also author of the scholarly study, The Quest for Anonymity: The Novels of George Eliot, published by University of Delaware Press. His stories have appeared over the past forty years in such journals as Seattle Review, Cimarron Review, Clackamas Literary Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Harrington Gay Men's Quarterly Fiction. Since 1978, his literary articles have been published in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Studies in the Novel, Twentieth Century Literature, The Kenyon Review, Papers on Language and Literature and others.