Author Spotlight

William Overstreet

I’ve been a professional writer for my entire career, mostly in international politics and economics, as you can see from my biography, below. I also spent seven years, while my wife was attending medical school and completing her residency, in the corporate medical technology field, with a focus on cardiology. In addition, for a time I worked as a free-lance editor, mainly for Storey Publishing. Halley’s Gathering is my first novel.

Halley’s Gathering emerged from my having lived within the Navajo Nation for four years. It’s a historical novel focused primarily on the period 1909–1911, but it backtracks as far as the Civil War. I wanted to try and capture a sense of the transition to the modern, broadly for the "Old West" and more specifically for the Navajo people, who faced the dual threats of assimilation and encroachment, and most significantly for my particular characters—Halley’s Gathering  is, after all, fiction, an entertainment—both Anglo and Native American. Given my longtime interest in the Ancestral Puebloans (the Anasazi), I also wanted to include their remarkable legacy.

I have two manuscripts in progress. The one closest to completion involves the close of World War II in the Pacific and its immediate aftermath. The second is my warped take on a traditional murder mystery. You can safely conclude that, at least when it comes to writing fiction, I have no interest in repeating myself. I appreciate that many readers like to know a bit about the authors they read, but fundamentally, I don’t think I’m of much importance. A book should stand on its own.

The US Review of Books has been a pleasure to work with. Their review was my first and a great encouragement. For Halley’s Gathering to be favorably compared to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove... well, I couldn’t have hoped for better.

About the Author: Born and raised in New York’s Hudson Valley, William Overstreet now lives in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. Before that, he spent four years in Fort Defiance, Arizona, within the Navajo Nation. He has written extensively on international politics and economics, principally in the Political Handbook of the World series, most recently for the Congressional Quarterly Press imprint. He has also published short fiction as well as essays, including one on Navajo ceremonialism, “The Navajo Nightway and the Western Gaze,” in American Indian Persistence and Resurgence (Duke University Press). He holds degrees from Cornell University (B.S.), the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (M.F.A.), and Binghamton University (Ph.D.).

 

Author Spotlight is an author interview exclusively for The US Review of Books and available through the Platinum Plus Review service. Author Spotlight interviews may be reprinted with full attribution to "The US Review of Books."