When a sibling unexpectedly inherits his grandfather's dairy farm, Will O'Shaughnessy turns to selling Fords in rural, pre-World War I southwestern Wisconsin. But over the next two decades, even as his automobile business booms and he raises a family with his true love, Mary, Will yearns to return to farming. Meanwhile, the small town of Ashley Springs weathers the war, the booming 20s, prohibition and the Great Depression. There's family drama in devastating illness and an estranged, alcoholic brother. Then, as automobile sales plunge in the deepening 1930s economic crisis, Will sees a reason to finally trade cars for cows. But can he convince his wife and daughters to follow him back out of town?
Harold William Thorpe grew up in Southwest Wisconsin and lived on farms for brief periods when he was very young. He spent many happy hours at his relative's farms, and during his teen years he detasseled corn, worked two summers as a live-in farm laborer, worked one summer as a Surge milking machine sales and service man, and worked part of another summer as a United States Department of Agriculture field man. After high school, he graduated from UW-Platteville with an education degree. He worked for eleven years in Janesville, Wisconsin - first as a general education and special education teacher, then the last four years as a school psychologist. During these years he started a business and earned a masters degree in educational psychology at UW-Madison. Afterward, he left Janesville for Utah State University where he earned a doctorate degree in education.
Upon returning to Wisconsin he took a position at UW-Oshkosh where he initiated a program to prepare students to teach the learning disabled. For the next twenty-five years he taught classes, supervised student teachers and graduate students, and served in administrative positions as a graduate program coordinator, a department chairperson, and a college associate dean. But his first love was conducting research that produced more than twenty-five publications in education and psychology journals.
After retirement, he decided to learn how to write fiction. Bittersweet Harvest is Book II of the O'Shaughnessy Chronicles.
