Bonnie Stepenoff grew up in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania and eventually moved to Missouri, where she became a professor of history at Southeast Missouri State University. Now retired, she continues to write non-fiction and poetry. She has six books to her credit, including Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River (University of Missouri Press, 2015), The Dead End Kids of St. Louis: Homeless Boys and the People who Tried to Save Them (University of Missouri Press, 2010), Big Spring Autumn (Truman State University Press, 2008), From French Community to Missouri Town: Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century (University of Missouri Press, 2006), Thad Snow: A Life of Social Reform in Southeast Missouri (University of Missouri Press, 2003), and Their Fathers’ Daughters: Silk Mill Workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania (Susquehanna University Press, 1999). Her articles, essays, and poetry have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including the Sherlock Holmes Journal (2016), Missouri Law and the American Conscience (2016), Red Moon Anthology (2009 and 2016), Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology (2013), Cultural Landscapes (2008), Mining Women (2006), The Other Missouri History (2004), Rebellious Families (2002), Labor History, Labor’s Heritage, New York History, Pennsylvania History, Missouri Historical Review, Gateway, Missouri Conservationist, Missouri Life, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and The Heron’s Nest. She lives in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
After years of subjecting the editors of St. Louis newspapers to eloquent letters on subjects as diverse as floods, tariffs, and mules, Thad Snow published his memoir From Missouri in his mid-seventies in 1954. He was barely retired from farming for more than half a century, mostly in the Missouri Bootheel, or “Swampeast Missouri,” as he called it. Now back in print with a new introduction by historian Bonnie Stepenoff, these sketches of a life, a region, and an era will delight readers new to this distinctive American voice as well as readers already familiar with this masterpiece of the American Midwest.