Laurence "Lars" Eighner Hexamer (born Laurence Vail Eighner, November 25, 1948 - December 23, 2021) was an American author and memoirist. He was the author of Travels with Lizbeth, a memoir of homelessness in the American Southwest during the late 1980s, "a book widely regarded as one of the finest memoirs of recent decades." Included as a chapter in that book was the essay "On Dumpster Diving," which is widely anthologized both at full length<ref>{{cite web |url=http://catalog.dclibrary.org/vufind/Record/ocm26747566/TOC |title=contents of The Pushcart Prize XVII |publisher=Catalog.dclibrary.org |accessdate=November 29, 2011 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://archive.today/20120710121043/http://catalog.dclibrary.org/vufind/Record/ocm26747566/TOC |archivedate=July 10, 2012 |df=mdy-all }}</ref> and in abridged form under the title "My Daily Dives in the Dumpster." Eighner also wrote Pawn to Queen Four, a novel; Lavender Blue: How to Write and Sell Gay Men's Erotica, also published as Elements of Arousal (an early edition includes an introduction by noted erotica author John Preston); Gay Cosmos, a work of gay theory; and numerous short works of gay men's erotica, collected under various titles. Early life and education Lars Eighner was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, into a family with various writing experiences. His mother was Alice Elizabeth Vail Eighner (later Harlow) and his father Lawrence Clifton Eighner. He was grandson of the Texas poets Alice Ewing Vail (The Big Thicket) and John Arthur Vail (John Vail Ballads). His birth name is Laurence Vail Eighner and he grew up in Houston, Texas, and graduated from Lamar High School in 1966. According to People magazine, Eighner attended school at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in ethical studies before he dropped out to become a counselor at an Austin drug crisis center. He also studied creative writing under George Williams of Rice University at the Corpus Christi Fine Arts Colony. As reported in The New York Times, in 1993, Eighner believed his dropping out of college was due to the combination of family disagreements over his sexual orientation and migraine headaches. Shortly after dropping out, his path to homelessness began. As reported in The New York Times, Eighner describes his falling out of his job at the Austin State Hospital as a result of an argument with a supervisor, leading him to quit. Career Eighner began writing for publication in the early 1980s. By that time he was generally known as Lars, the result of having worked in a small office with two Larrys. Because in early writing attempts he had