Edward J. Renehan Jr. - author & sometime musi

The facts, just the facts:
My home page is here .
I'm the writer of books that include Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Basic Books/Perseus, November 2007), Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons (Basic Books/Perseus, 2005), The Kennedys at War (Doubleday, 2002), The Secret Six (Crown, 1995) and John Burroughs: An American Naturalist (Black Dome Press, 1992).

While biography remains my first love, I've as well been quite active in other realms including green-politics and folk music.
My prose has appeared in American Heritage, Veranda, and other national publications.
Terrain: I live with my family in southern coastal Rhode Island.
Music: During my dissident youth I recorded with Pete Seeger for Moe Asch's Folkways Records, now Smithsonian Folkways . I was literally a kid when I studied guitar with the great Gary Davis . (If you want my opinion, Jorma Kaukonen reigns as the best contemporary interpreter of Gary's tunes.) Way back in 1980, I edited The Clearwater Songbook, with an introduction by Seeger, which G. Schirmer published as a fundraiser for the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater . (A previous effort had been Don McLean's Songs & Sketches of the First Clearwater Crew published by North River Press in 1970.) March of 2008 saw me playing my first public gig in a very long time, performing with Happy and Artie Traum in Albany. (Photos in my pics section.) I had fun.
I am a member of PEN American Center .
I was diagnosed as "type 2" bipolar (aka, manic depressive) in 2007. This is a progressive biochemical disorder from which I've evidently suffered for a very long time, perhaps even since adolescence, and which had reached a grave critical mass in recent years. I am currently under treatment, on meds that my doctor and I are fine-tuning, and I am slowly learning how to cope more efficiently and constructively than I have in the past. (In the meantime, I continue to pick up the shattered pieces from one of my last great, extended hypo-manias.) I only mention this because I approve of the movement of sufferers who are "outing" themselves, discussing the disorder, and thus working to remove the stigma that surrounds it.
A number of my books are available in audio editions from Recorded Books .