William McKeen

Acting Chair, Department of Journalism, Visiting Professor of Journalism

BA, MA, Indiana University
PhD, University of Oklahoma

Professor McKeen is the author of six books and the editor of three more. His most recent books are Outlaw Journalist (W.W. Norton, 2008), a biography of Hunter S. Thompson, Highway 61 (W.W. Norton, 2003), a memoir of a 6,000-mile road trip with his teen-age son, and two anthologies, Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay (W. W. Norton, 2000) and Literary Journalism: A Reader (Wadsworth, 2000). He is completing Mile Marker Zero, a non-fiction book about the writers, artists and actors who converged on Key West in the 1970s, to be published by Harmony Books in 2011. He is also editing an anthology of stories about growing up in Florida called Paradise Recalled, to be published by the University Press of Florida in 2011. Before beginning his teaching career, he worked for several newspapers and magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, The American Spectator, the Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.), the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, and the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. His writing has appeared in Holiday, American History, Maxim, The Saturday Evening Post, and many other newspapers and magazines. He has appeared on The Today Show, The O’Reilly Factor, The CBS Evening News, and many other news programs. He is book editor of Creative Loafing, an alt-weekly in Tampa, Fla. He earned his bachelor’s degree in history and his master’s degree in mass communication from Indiana University and his PhD in higher education administration from the University of Oklahoma. His master’s thesis studied the portrayal of journalists in American popular culture and his doctoral dissertation was an account of student dissent on a college campus in the days after the Kent State shootings in 1970. He taught at Western Kentucky University from 1977 to 1982, the University of Oklahoma from 1982 to 1986, and the University of Florida from 1986 to 2010. His major teaching areas have been literary journalism, the history of journalism, reporting, and the history of rock’n’roll. Website: www.williammckeen.com