Upstaters

A native son on the history, literature, culture, and characters of the Upstate New York he loves.

Over the last three-plus decades, Bill Kauffman has written about and interviewed upstate New York novelists, politicians, and civic activists who have given the region much of its pith, vitality, and distinctiveness. Upstaters collects the best of these, including profiles of upstate novelists Walter D. Edmonds, John Gardner, and Henry W. Clune; a portrait of congressional legend and World Bank president Barber Conable; appreciations of underknown writers Josephine Young Case, Martha Treichler, and Warren Hunting Smith; and a cast of characters that includes dying men and enterprising women, enfants terribles and eminences grises, doomed folksingers, and the cheapest man in America. These men and women do not exist in isolation; they give life to and draw life from their little places, and so their communities also slip into profile, from the literary capital of New York State (Utica) to the flame-tender of an all-but-extinct Olympic sport (Angelica). Kauffman, former vice president of the minor-league Batavia Muckdogs of the New York-Penn League (extinguished by Major League Baseball), writes also of the fight to maintain baseball in a Rust Belt town in a bottom-line age. His tone throughout is by turns amused, hortatory, wistful, angry, and earnest, but most of all animated by love for the part of New York that has nurtured, annoyed, and entertained him for a lifetime.