Bill Kauffman
Bill Kauffman is the author of eleven books, among them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette (Henry Holt), Ain’t My America (Metropolitan), Look Homeward, America (ISI), and Poetry Night at the Ballpark (FPR Books). His next book, Upstaters, is due from SUNY Press in 2026. He is a columnist for The American Conservative and The Spectator World. Bill wrote the screenplay for the 2013 feature film Copperhead. He is a founding editor of Front Porch Republic and has served as a legislative assistant to Senator Pat Moynihan, editor for various magazines and publishers, and vice president of the Batavia Muckdogs, a professional baseball team that was euthanized by Major League Baseball. He lives with his wife Lucine in his native Genesee County, New York.
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3 comments
Ray Olson
Bill–You shame me, I’m afraid. I’ve read and reviewed many of your books, but not the Dispatches. I’ve got a copy, of course. I’ll bring it to the head of my reading queue. Thanks for nudging my conscience. I was keenly gratified that you quoted Minnesota’s great champion (who ran into the same kind of chilly response to his realism about Minnesotans that you did about bringing Batavia to life), Sinclair Lewis. He had been so thoroughly slandered by litcrits and perfessers by the time–a scant 15 years after his death–I matriculated at the University of Minnesota that I was scared off from his work until a few years ago, when a dear friend gave me occasion (related to the brou-haha over Scott Walker’s union-busting bills) to read It Can’t Happen Here. More recently, my Netflix queue compelled me to read Arrowsmith and the completely forgotten, I’d say, Mantrap before I saw the movies made of them. The latter are no less satirical that ICHH and vastly more probable as well as, in the case of Mantrap, funnier. The films made of them are ghastly but good-lookin’ (Arrowsmith) and entertaining but lame (Mantrap), respectively. The next Lewis opus I’ll crack will probably be Dodsworth, because of its 1936 filming (I’m presently at 1934 in my chronologically arranged Netflix queue).
Your fellow friend-at-home (at last!)–Ray
Bill Kauffman
Thanks, Ray. My favorite Sinclair Lewis novel remains Babbitt, a hilarious regionalist dystopia. He sure loved your state. Like his character Cass Timberlane, Lewis memorized Minnesota’s eighty-seven counties and county seats. He once said that he wrote Main Street from “a love of Main Street, a belief in Main Street’s inherent power.” He’s do for a revival, ain’t he?
Ray Olson
Dear Bill–He sure is! And Tom Fleming recommended Babbitt to me just two days ago. Not that I wasn’t well aware of its stature. I rather like having discovered Lewis through some of his lesser work, though I am very fond of Mantrap, which is a consummate satire of the Wilderness Experience as well as a reminder that decent enough people still can do one another wrong, cuz it’s just human nature, alas, to do so.
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