Ned Fielden

As a restless small-town New England boy, Ned Fielden bicycled west as soon as his undergraduate thesis at Hampshire College was finished. Thirteen years later his bicycling days ended when a hit-and-run accident with a truck paralyzed him from the waist down. Now a tenured librarian at San Francisco State University, he has given academic papers internationally on library history. He is also father to four — two “grown and gone,” one at university. He lives with his wife, “a wonderful and enduringly patient woman,” in Berkeley, Calif., along with their teenager and three cats.