Robert T. McMaster

Robert T. McMaster completed his undergraduate education at Clark University, then earned graduate degrees from Boston College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts. Early in his career he taught middle school science, then worked as an administrator for several environmental education organizations. After completing his graduate studies, he taught biology and botany at Smith College, Connecticut College, and Holyoke Community College.

One of McMaster’s interests is New England history, especially the early twentieth century. He found inspiration in his parents’ reminiscences of growing up in that era, particularly his father's stories of riding the streetcars that plied city streets and country roads in those days. Those stories led him to write "The Trolley Days Series" of four historical novels. Set in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts, they follow the lives of four young people growing up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in the tumultuous World War I era.

McMaster’s ancestral ties to Ireland led him to undertake a second project, "The County Wicklow Mysteries," in 2022. Set in modern-day Ireland, "Rose of Glenkerry" and "Fugitive from Injustice" follow the lives Rosie O’Malley and Cary McGurk as they set out on their adult lives in a changing world. Rosie’s story is unique in contemporary fiction, including her struggle with colitis as a child and adjusting to life with an ostomy.

McMaster ‘s latest novel, "Emma and George: The Knightleys of Highbury," is a sequel to Jane Austen’s beloved "Emma," following Emma and George Knightley and their friends through harrowing times in early nineteenth-century England.

McMaster's fascination with Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864), renowned American geologist and paleontologist, began when he visited the Pratt Museum of Natural History at Amherst College over half a century ago. In 2014, while doing research for one of his novels, he discovered to his great surprise that there had never been a biography written of Hitchcock. In 2021 he published "All the Light Here Comes from Above: The Life and Legacy of Edward Hitchcock." More than a century-and-a-half after his death, the story of one of nineteenth-century America’s most influential scientists at last had been told. Since the publication of that book, he has also published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals on Hitchcock and the development of American geology in the nineteenth century.

Now retired from teaching, McMaster lives in Williamsburg, Massachusetts.