David Nolan, writer and social activist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946. Very little is known about the details of his life and early career but it is known that during his youth Nolan lived in Washington, D.C., and New York City and that his father Joseph Nolan was a journalist for United Press International.
Nolan attended the University of Virginia where he studied history and political science from 1963 through 1965. During this period he also became involved with a number of social action and civil rights organizations, and he left school without graduating to join the staff of the Virginia Students Civil Rights Committee. For several years he was involved in community organizing in southern Virginia.
In 1967 Nolan became editor of the Southern Student Organizing Committee's journal New South Student. In 1969 Nolan became associated with Penn Community Services, a community organization first established as a school for freed slaves at Beaufort, South Carolina, in l862.
From 1971 to 1977 Nolan lived in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was active with the local office of the U.S. China Peoples Friendship Association. Nolan was a member of the first national steering committee for this organization, and he served as national vice chair from 1975 to 1977. He helped organize several American tours and traveled to China himself in 1974 and 1975.
In 1975 Nolan married Becky Hamilton, a movie critic for an Atlanta newspaper, whom he met because of their shared interest in the U.S. China Friendship Association and other social action groups. They gave birth to a daughter in 1976 and a son in 1979.
In the late 1970's the Nolans moved to St. Augustine, Florida, where he worked for the Historic Preservation Board as a surveyor of historic sites. When this grant funded project ended in 1980 he began working on his first book, Fifty Feet in Paradise, a popular history of the state of Florida published in 1984. More recently Nolan has been working on a second book and editing David Rockefeller's memoirs.
