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About
Michael Cooney

Michael Cooney's historical novels are set in upstate New York and focus on largely forgotten individuals who were reviled in their own times. He sees the turncoat Hanyost Schuyler as a hero of the American Revolution and the condemned murderess Roxy Druse as a devoted mother who gave her life for her daughter. His 2012 novel, The Red Nurse, centers on the socialist organizer Helen Schloss who led the Little Falls textile strike of 1912. The 2013 biography of Alfred Dolge is a short introduction to a remarkable upstate New York industrialist and reformer who established an early model of Social Security in the 1880s. "The River That Flows Both Ways," revised in 2017, is based on the life of Harmen van den Bogart who was condemned to death for his same sex orientation in the Dutch colony of New Netherland. More recently, he has published a collection of science fiction stories and made available free PDFs of plays he and his students wrote in the 1970s.