William Elliott Hazelgrove
Description
William Hazelgrove ] ]Born in Richmond, Virginia, and carted back and forth between Virginia and Baltimore, I blame my rootless, restless personality on my father. He was and is a traveling salesman with a keen gift of gab, great wit, a ready joke, and could sell white tennis shoes to coal miners. It was during these sojourns up and down the east coast I soaked up the stories that would later be Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways. I think authors should exploit their family history before raping the rest of the culture for material. Dad finally got tired of the east and moved to the Midwest when I was fourteen. We settled outside of Chicago. It is here I came of age and went off to college for seven years -- two degrees and one novel later I returned to Chicago and lived in many different apartments, trying to get a little two hundred page manuscript called Ripples published. When a local printer said he would take a chance on my book, I jumped and had my first novel published by a man who had never published anything. Great reviews and moderate sales put me back to my jobs as a janitor, baker, waiter, construction worker, teacher, real estate tycoon, mortgage broker, professor, security guard, salesman -- anything to make a buck and keep writing. The printer lost his mind and published my second novel, too. That landed me with Bantam after some rave reviews and a paperback auction for my second novel, Tobacco Sticks. A third novel, Mica Highways, was sold on less than one hundred and fifty pages to Bantam and then I did a strange thing -- I settled down to writing in Ernest Hemingway's birthplace in Oak Park, Illinois. I have since been looking for the Great American Novel up in the old red oak rafters and I think I might have finally found one... we'll see. www.billhazelgrove.com
Books
Al Capone and the 1933 World's Fair
"William Elliot Hazelgrove provides the exciting and sprawling history behind the 1933 World's Fair, the last of the golden age. He reveals the story of the six millionaire businessmen, dubbed the Secret Six, who beat Al Capone at his own game, ending the gangster era as Prohibition was repealed. He also details the story of an intriguing woman, Sally Rand, who embodied the ideals of the World's Fair with her own rags-to-riches story and brought sex into the open, as well as the story of Rufus and Charles Dawes, who gave the fair a theme and found financing during the worst economic times the country had ever experienced."--Jacket.
Shots fired in terminal 2
Though focused on one terrifying incident that the author witnessed, this story is also a prototype of American shootings showing the interplay of victims, police, media, the shooter, and what constitutes this peculiar American form of violence.
The pitcher
Ricky's mom tries to help him practice, but Ricky won't make the high-school team unless his neighbor, a washed-up 1978 World Series pitcher, agrees to coach him. The plot contains profanity and violence.
Wright brothers, wrong story
"This book is the first deconstruction of the Wright Brothers' myth. They were not--as we have all come to believe--two halves of the same apple. Each had a distinctive role in creating the first 'flying machine'"--Provided by the publisher.
Real Santa
George Kronenfeldt is an unemployed engineer with one shot to keep his daughter's belief in Santa intact. When Megan tells him the only way she will believe in Santa is if she can videotape him and then tells her fourth grade class she will prove the existence of Santa Claus by posting her video to YouTube, George realizes he must become the Real Santa. He devises a plan to land nine reindeer on his roof and go down his chimney, hiring a broken down movie director who eventually has him funding a full scale production that bankrupts him and threatens his marriage. When George goes to find the "Real Santa" to help him, the line between what is real and magic is crossed. Real Santa is a funny heartwarming story of parenthood gone wrong and illuminates what lengths parents will go to keep their children happy.