Just Who IS Kevin Donohue?
Kevin Donohue was born in Silesia, now a part of Poland. His parents were part of an Irish gypsy troupe who were touring Eastern Europe in the days prior to WWII. They split off from the troupe over a dispute about money, and his father took a job as a stage hand for a local theater company in East Prussia. When the war broke out he was gathered up in a draft net by the NAZI's and was sent to fight in the then Soviet Union. Captured by the Russians at Stalingrad, his father was sent to a POW camp and was never seen or heard of again.
To make ends meet, Mr Donohue's mother became a seamstress for a small circus in Poland. Three years later she left young Kevin under the auspices of the owner of the circus and took a job in Heidelberg working as a stenographer for the American prosecutors of War Criminals at the Nuremberg trials.
'My mother literally sold me to the Circus!" Mr Donohue wrote in his memoirs. The owner of the circus was a kindly man, but worked Kevin hard at a variety of jobs in the circus, including cleaning the animal cages.
Ten years after the war, the circus was invited to play some venues in Canada and Kevin took the opportunity to run off from the toils of the circus and entered the United States illegally. He applied and was accepted to Columbia University where he majored in creative writing. His peers at that time were Philip Roth and John Updike. Mr Donohue came under the mentorship of the writer James Jones who was then teaching at Columbia. Jones taught Kevin how to write a good sentence, and that has been the hallmark of Mr Donohue's writing ever since.
"The secret to good writing is to craft a perfect sentence. The hard part is stringing them together!", he recently told a lecture audience of seven at his Alma Mater.
Mr Donohue currently lives rent-free in his own head.
