Place. Limits. Liberty.
Join us for FPR’s 2025 Conference on “Work and Leisure”

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.

Articles by Bill Kauffman

Finger Foods

Set in the heart of the Burned-Over District, the Finger Lakes region of New York is among the culturally, historically, and culinarily richest parts of the country. Now it has…
October 22, 2012

George McGovern, RIP

My 2006 profile/interview of the patriot from Mitchell, South Dakota: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/come-home-america-2/.
October 21, 2012

Cast Away

On third parties: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/party-animus/.
October 11, 2012

A Goodman is Hard to Find

I’m happy to report that New York Review Books has just reprinted Growing Up Absurd (1960), Paul Goodman’s classic plea for the human scale against the postwar corporate and military-industrial…
October 5, 2012

Don’t It Make You Wanna Go Home Now?

Joe South, RIP:  http://youtu.be/8V1JJqNKjVU. "God, how I wanna go home...."
September 6, 2012

LDS Trip

Musings on our Burned-Over District neighbors, the Mormons: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/just-deseret/.
August 8, 2012

“Like Most Satirists I am a Reactionary”

Native son and caustically loving biographer of our country Gore Vidal  (http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-last-republican) has died. Don't mourn; read: Burr, Lincoln, Screening History, Homage to Daniel Shays, United States, The Last Empire....
August 1, 2012

Bringing it all Back Home

Reason's Jesse Walker on Benjamin Looker's account of Karl Hess, Milton Kotler, and the power-to-the-neighborhoods movement of the late '60s and early '70s: http://reason.com/blog/2012/07/10/all-power-to-the-neighborhoods.
July 10, 2012

Clang, Clang Go the Jail Guitar Doors

Today from The American Conservative: www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/rockys-drug-war/
July 6, 2012

Ray of Light

Ray Bradbury may be at peace, but I doubt he's resting. Herewith an old essay of mine on the boy from Waukegan as a Midwestern regionalist.
June 7, 2012

Monk, He Shines

I’m delighted to note the publication of Surpassing Pleasure (Porcupine’s Quill: http://porcupinesquill.ca), a collection of poetry by John Slater, a Cistercian who is known within his order as Brother Isaac.…
April 2, 2012

That Long Black Cloud is Comin’ Down…

Putting Sam Peckinpah in his place: "Peckinpah Country" (from The American Conservative).
March 29, 2012