Christopher Hogwood came home in a shoebox.  He was the runt among runts, a piglet so sickly that the farmers called him “the spotted thing.”  They also said that he wouldn’t get too big.  Christopher Hogwood thrived. He grew to weigh 750 pounds and command an empire of admirers bringing him slops, apples, cheese, ice cream….  He loved company and people loved seeing him.  I became his escort (after his escapes to tour neighbor’s gardens), personal carpenter (for pen repairs) and on-call staff.  In my first children’s book, Hogwood Steps Out, (Roaring Brook), I share a little of Chris’s great spirit.

In the 14 years I knew Chris, he allowed me some time off, which I used to write five books, including The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age.  “The New York Times Book Review”said The Same Ax, Twice is “filled with insight and eloquence …A memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom.”

I have also written The Bones of the Earth; Skylark: The Life, Lies and Inventions of Harry Atwood;  Cosmopolis: Yesterday’s Cities of the Future and In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind Review said, “Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place…. But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield’s In the Memory House.”  There’s more information at www.authorwire.com

The writer and critic Guy Davenport offered this judgement: “Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence.  All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing. He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian.  He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent.  His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”

Davenport also thought that Farmer Hogwood, as he called him, had eyes like the actor Claude Rains (who played the French Lieutenant in Casablanca). For information about author signings and school visits, please visit http://www.authorwire.com/h/h_bio.html