Jim Garrison: His Life and Times, The Early Years, is a biography of the former District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana from his 1922 birth in Iowa and service in World War II - he was among those assigned to Dachau Concentration Camp the day after its liberation - to his years confronting the corrupt politics of Louisiana. In 1997, Joan Mellen started to work on the story of former Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison's life. That biography turned into the story of Garrison's investigation of the assassination of President John Kennedy, and then into a new investigation of the assassination itself in her book, "A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History," published in 2005.