Keith deSales Davis was born in Baltimore and grew up in Southern Maryland in the 1970s and early 1980s. He now lives in Hampstead, North Carolina.

The Tambourine Man began in 1987 and 1988, during his senior year at Salisbury University, when he worked part-time at the Camelot Music store in the Salisbury Mall. His manager sometimes played a documentary on the Monterey Pop Festival on the store’s one television, and when things were slow, Keith found himself watching. He knew almost nothing about Monterey or Haight-Ashbury, but he began to imagine a fictional band and the road that brought them to that stage.

The idea stayed with him. After taking screenwriting courses in the early 1990s, he wrote three copyrighted screenplays: The Tambourine Man, Places in the Sun, and The Cookie Jar (also known as The Two-ness of Souls).

From 1988 until his retirement in 2025, he built a career in records and knowledge management in the life sciences industry. He is a Certified Records Manager (retired) and a Certified Knowledge Manager. That work taught him to document every fact and where it came from. He brought the same discipline to the novel, with a role sheet for each character, a fixed timeline, and a source log for every historical detail.

In retirement, he returned to the screenplay and decided the story had always belonged in a novel. He has written full-time since December 2025. The Tambourine Man, his first novel, was published as an ebook in November 2026, with paperback and hardcover editions to follow in 2027. He also writes screenplays and stage plays.