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Author Talk with S.T. Haggerty – Norman Rockwell’s Models In and Out of the Studio

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Join us on Sunday, April 23 at 3:00 p.m. for an Author Talk with S.T. Haggerty about his book Norman Rockwell’s Models In and Out of the Studio!

 

Visit S.T. Haggerty’s website here.

 

About the author: “My father was a musician for lively Broadway musicals. Enchanted by the stories as a small boy, I couldn’t learn to spell words fast enough to form sentences. I just had to write about my vacations in Vermont. My family and I would leave our home in the New York suburb of Old Greenwich, Connecticut to spend entire summers­ in a rustic 1700s farmhouse on a dirt road in the West Arlington community.

My brothers and I took on chores in dairy barns and hayed the fields along the scenic Batten Kill River. We learned that our friends and neighbors had modeled for the iconic paintings of Norman Rockwell. We swam under the covered bridge in front of his former studio and attended dances in the Grange pavilion across the street. Norman had loved to square dance there. The people proved to be down-to-earth, just as Norman portrayed them. He first hung his Four Freedoms in the church hall a few steps away. He had conceived them when President Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech by that name to justify the entry of the United States into WWII.

I absolutely loved my English literature and writing classes in college. Bernard  Malamud, the author of the best-seller, The Natural, did a reading for us. I seized the chance to chat. I wanted to be an author and do the same thing!

I attended the University of South Carolina Graduate School of Journalism on an academic scholarship. I was selected for the American Society of Magazine Editor’s Internship Program, and then as one of three students for McGraw-Hill’s trainee program in Manhattan. I stayed on and found myself in places like Silicon Valley interviewing the country’s leading executives.

I eventually took a break from rigorous writing to work as a handyman. This segued into becoming a master carpenter, running my own remodeling business, and becoming a construction manager. Did I quit writing? Never! I wrote free-lance articles and finished several books of fiction.”