Kenneth Ray Young

Kenneth R. Young is a distinguished scholar of Southeast Asia and United States military history. He was born in Oklahoma in 1939, in the latter part of the Great Depression when many “Okies” fled the state for California as John Steinbeck vividly described in The Grapes of Wrath. For the first ten years of his life, he lived in a house without inside plumbing. But before he entered the first grade his grandmother taught him to read, opening up the world to him, along with many unimaginable personal and professional opportunities.

By the ninth grade Young dreamed of going to college and becoming a writer, but a lack of family money limited his prospects. Luckily, when he was fifteen years old his family moved to California, where community and state colleges were relatively inexpensive. After he graduated from high school, he paid his way through East L.A. Community College for an AA, Cal State (LA) for a BA and MA, and finally, New York University (NYU), from which he received his PhD in 1970.

As a university professor at Western Connecticut State University Young taught courses on US diplomacy in East and Southeast Asia. Although teaching was his prime concentration, he published many scholarly articles in academic journals and received a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines in 1979. Later, he spent ten years researching and writing The General's General, a biography on Lt. General Arthur MacArthur, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner during the Civil War who in 1900 became the US Military Governor of the Philippines (and the father of General Douglas MacArthur). The General's General won several awards and was the basis for a PBS documentary on the elder MacArthur.

After thirty-one years of teaching, reaching the rank of full professor, Young retired and became an opinionated senior and golfer. In 2012 he self-published a novel, Twice Honored: The Legend of Captain Littleton Wyler, a US military officer who won two Congressional Medals of Honor fighting the “insurgents” in the Philippines in 1900. Back in the Day marks his latest contribution to the world of letters.