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 interest to the author.
Upstaters: Poets, Pols, Prophets and Bush-League Heroes of Upstate New York (SUNY Press, 2026) collects these into a single volume.
These include profiles of upstate novelists Walter D. Edmonds of Boonville, NY (Drums Along the Mohawk, 1903-1998) and John Gardner of Batavia (Grendel, 1933-1982), and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle essayist Henry W. Clune (1890-1995).
Kauffman also provides a portrait of former congressman and World Bank president Barber Conable (1922-2003) of Wyoming County, NY.
He offers appreciations of little-known writers Josephine Young Case (1907-1990), Martha Treichler (1929-2023) of Hammondsport, and Warren Hunting Smith (1905-1998) of Geneva, NY; 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.
Some of these claims are strange, from Kaufman declaring Utica as “the literary capital of New York State,” to Angelica in Allegany County, described as “the flame-tender of an all-but-extinct Olympic sport” – roque, an obscure 19th-century American variation of croquet that was an official event at the 1904 Summer Olympics.
Kauffman, former vice president of the minor-league Batavia Muckdogs of the New York-Penn League (1939 to 2020, 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.
Bill Kauffman is the author of many books, among them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive, and Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism.
He also wrote the screenplay for the feature film Copperhead, set in upstate New York. He lives in his native Batavia, New York.
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