About

Michigan-born author John Cohassey earned a Master’s Degree in history from Wayne State University (1995).  Trained in the visual arts, he played music professionally for many years before becoming a freelance writer, contributing articles to periodicals like The Detroit News, and over fifty entries of African-American music and culture for Gale Research Inc.  His first book, Toast of the Town:  The Life and Times of Sunnie Wilson (Wayne State University, 1998), won an award of merit from the Historical Society of Michigan. In 2007 Cohassey served as a consultant for the History Channel documentary Hippies, and co-authored the book American Cultural Rebels (McFarland & Co. Inc., 2008).  He subsequently authored Hemingway and Pound:  A Most Unlikely Friendship (McFarland 2014), and numerous self-published works such as Banned in Detroit:  The Suppression of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.  His book, The 22^nd Michigan Infantry and the Road to Chickamauga (McFarland & Co. Inc., 2018), was followed in 2020 by the short novel, As Fate Would Have It and the non-fiction work Distant Guns, Remembered Words:  Hemingway’s American Civil War.