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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

The Ballad of Edward Abbey

Tom Russell, true son of the American Southwest, sings about the Man from Home. Thanks to Brian Frizzell for the link.
March 19, 2012

Mallon Time

I was delighted to see that Thomas Mallon, a superb novelist whose subject is often American politics (my favorites are Henry and Clara and Two Moons), has just published Watergate:…
February 16, 2012

On Wisconsin

My friend Paul Buhle, the great historian of the American left, has edited, with his wife Mari Jo Buhle, It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the…
January 27, 2012

Seen Your Video

This is the last audience to which I should announce such a thing but after fumbling an editing gig or two because I lacked a one-stop site containing my bio,…
January 26, 2012

Super Cuts

Brian (no relation to Lefty) Frizzell, Brooklyn's archivist of Americana, sends a link to Matt Morris's Pickin' & Trimmin' http://vimeo.com/31066145, a lovely documentary short film about a barbershop in Drexel, North…
January 9, 2012

Iowa is for Peace-Lovers

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY---Our daughter will be spending the snowy months rehearsing her role as Marian the Librarian in her high school’s production of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” that tuneful…
December 30, 2011

Tonight I Feel So Far Away From Home…

This Christmas--like last Christmas, and the one before that , and the one before that....--hundreds of thousands of our countrymen and women are far from their homes and families, fighting…
December 22, 2011

Vonnegut Laid(?) to Rest

Burned-Over District, NY---I’m reading Charles J. Shields’s absorbing new biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes, and while its morose subject deservedly never won Father or Husband of the…
December 8, 2011

Que Surratt, Surratt

When next you stumble into the corner video store: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/redford-goes-ron-paul/
December 2, 2011

Don’t It Make You Wanna Go Home Now?

Mobility is the great undiagnosed sickness afflicting America. All of our ruling class and most of our writing class consist of deracinated careerists who scorn the placebound as ambitionless losers…
November 6, 2011

Come Saturday Evening…

....we'll be reading aloud--for the fourteenth consecutive year--from the works of Batavia's native (if sometimes wayward) son John Gardner. Where? The Pokadot, literary-culinary capital of NY, at the corner of…
October 21, 2011

B Movies–in Black and White

No, not the tune by the Fabulous Poodles, but rather my memories of Peter H. Clune, who was gunned down in the bleakest film noir you'll ever see: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/the-last-picture-show/.
October 13, 2011