Harold W. Thorpe

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 detassled 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.

He graduated from UW-Plattville with an education degree. He worked for eleven years in Janesville, Wisconsin, first as a fifth-grade and special education teacher, then the last four years as a school psychologist. He earned a master’s degree in educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a doctorate degree in education from Utah State University.

After earning his doctorate, he took a position at UW-Oshkosh. There, he initiated a program to prepare students to teach children with learning disabilities. For the next twenty-five years he taught behavior management, instructional strategies, and research 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, including Remedial and Special Education, Computers in the Schools, Journal of Leaning Disabilities, Journal of Special Education Technology, “Psychology in the Schools, Learning Disability Quarterly, Corrective and Social Psychology, Education and Training of the Mentally Retarded, and others, as well.

Near the end of his university career he headed a research project that resulted in the return of $52 million from the federal Department of Education to Wisconsin schools.

After retirement, he decided to learn how to write fiction in order to turn his 92 year old mother's memoirs into a novel. The award-winning result is the O'Shaughnessy Chronicles.

Giddyap Tin Lizzie was the first book followed by Bittersweet Harvest. These 2 novels tell the story of Will O'Shaughnessy, his wife Mary and their family saga as they weather life's ups and downs together.

The O’Shaughnessy Chronicles are set in rural Iowa County, Wisconsin in the early-to-mid 20th Century and they reference real people, places and events of southwestern Wisconsin and the period.

In addition, he has written 4 children’s books. The Good Friends Storybooks are chapter books for middle school children that mix adventure, quirky talking animals, gentle lessons about friendship, and Wisconsin history.