Bill's Books
A DIRTY YEAR
Sex, Suffrage, & Scandal
in Gilded Age New York
A nonfiction narrative of 1872 New York, a city convulsing with social upheaval and sexual revolution and beset with all the excitement and challenges a moment of transformation brings.
From Chicago Review Press, April 2020
And from New York's Dutch Era
A Novel of New Amsterdam
The Mevrouw Who Saved Manhattan
"[A] romp through the history of New Netherland that would surely have Petrus Stuyvesant complaining about the riot transpiring between its pages."
- de Halve Maen, Journal of the Holland Society of New York
Stories & Stuff
News & Views
Book Talk
Join me in Conversation with New York State Archivist Tom Ruller about A Dirty Year
Now On YouTube
On New York
"I then could hear it two thousand miles away, or so it seemed. The distant chant seemed both repellent and alluring, a siren's chorus that even now I seem to hear. I listen to it once again across the many miles and the many years, not with the pathos of yearning for gone days but with the gladness of having known the springtime."
- Journalist Gene Fowler, after moving back to Denver, c. 1915
“I didn’t need any entertainment. . . . It was beautiful going to Washington Square or Tompkins Square Park and seeing people gathered to read poetry or sing or play chess. For me, New York meant freedom.”
- Poet & songstress Patti Smith on moving to New York broke, 1966
On Writing
"If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works."
- John Dos Passos
"Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
- Collette
On LIfe
"Anger dies, genius endures."
- Garrison Keillor
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez