Biography
Robert McParland is a creative writer and literary critic. He is a songwriter-composer/lyricist who has written the lyrics and libretto for three musicals produced in regional theatre. He is a professor of English and Humanities.
Robert McParland writes fiction, literary criticism, and on American culture. He is also a musician and a lyricist/composer member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. His books include: The Last Alchemist: A Novel, Charles Dickens’s American Audience, Citizen Steinbeck: Giving Voice to the People, Writing About Joseph Conrad, Music and Literary Modernism, Film and Literary Modernism, Mark Twain’s Audience, Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Other Writers of the 1920s Shaped America, Native Sons to King's Men: The Literary Landscape of the 1940s, Science Fiction and Classic Rock, Myth and Magic in Heavy Metal Music, Finding God in the Devil's Music: Critical Essays on Rock and Religion, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's 50 Year Quest: Music to Change the World, Bestseller: A Century of America's Favorite Books, The Rock Music Imagination, The People We Meet in Stories, Singer-Songwriters of the 1970s: 150 Profiles, Cultural Memory and Consciousness in the Modernist Novel, Rock Music Icons, and the short story collection In the Nick of Time. He also often writes on popular music. Charles Dickens's American Audience received the Kornitzer Book Award (2011).
The Last Alchemist is a mystery-suspense novel in which a former Nazi doctor who has hidden away on a farm in America is encountered by some twenty-year-olds who become intrigued by him. They enter a now dangerous world of mystery. This novel addresses the plight of the lebensborn children of World War II in Scandinavia and Germany, the issue of antisemitism, eugenics, and concerns about neo-Nazi domestic terrorism.