William McKeen

William McKeen grew up in the military and so was a globetrotter from birth. He spent a good deal of his childhood in England and Germany and lived on the southernmost military base on the U.S. mainland during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Somehow he survived. His early career ambitions were to be a cartographer or an architect, but he started writing for a daily paper while still in high school and got hooked on journalism. He’s worked for newspapers and magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post, where he edited his first book, The American Story. He earned degrees in history and journalism from Indiana University and a PhD in higher education administration from the University of Oklahoma. He taught at the University of Florida for 24 years and chaired that school’s Department of Journalism for 12 years. He served as BU’s journalism chair for 13 years, marking a quarter-century in that job. His primary teaching areas are History and Principles of Journalism, Literary Journalism and the Graduate Symposium. He has written or edited 13 books, including Outlaw Journalist, the biography of Hunter S Thompson, and Mile Marker Zero, a group biography of writers, painters and musicians who found their artistic identities in Key West. His other books include Rock and Roll is Here to Stay, a massive history of modern music; Highway 61, a memoir of a 6,000-mile road trip with his teen-age son; and Everybody Had an Ocean, a nonfiction narrative about the intersection of music and crime in 1960s Los Angeles, featuring an appearance by psycho killer and failed musician Charles Manson.