About the Author

Stephen O'Connor teaches creative writing at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of Will My Name Be Shouted Out?, an account of his years teaching creative writing at an inner-city school in New York, and a collection of short fiction, Rescue.

Reviews

"O'Connor tells these stories lucidly and gracefully. He is particularly evocative in his descriptions of the transportation conditions the children endured, the conditions of urban poverty in New York in the 1800s, and of a typical day of a New York newsboy." --Ruth Wallis Herndon "New York Times Book Review"

"O'Connor's immensely readable book vividly portrays Brace and the world in which he operated. Orphan Trains not only offers us a trip to the past but provides historical context crucial to understanding and evaluating present-day attitudes and policies about poverty, families, and children." --Merle Rubin "Los Angeles Times"

"With grace and precision, and a novelist's sense of time, place, and character, Stephen O'Connor has thoughtfully retraced the gripping, often harrowing tale, showing us in the process how a great city came both to abandon and to redeem some of its most vulnerable citizens." New York--Ric Burns, director of the PBS series New York

"In chronicling one of the first ambitious, privately sponsored social welfare programs in the United States, Mr. O'Connor provides an absorbing portrait of the nation at a moment of wrenching change, a moment that has in many ways not yet passed. . . . Orphan Trains is a moving and instructive story, and as he tells it, Mr. O'Connor never loses sight of the real people and real lives at its center."--Richard Bernstein "New York Times"

"With grace and precision, and a novelist's sense of time, place, and character, Stephen O'Connor has thoughtfully retraced the gripping, often harrowing tale, showing us in the process how a great city came both to abandon and to redeem some of its most vulnerable citizens." New York--Ric Burns, director of the PBS series New York
"In chronicling one of the first ambitious, privately sponsored social welfare programs in the United States, Mr. O'Connor provides an absorbing portrait of the nation at a moment of wrenching change, a moment that has in many ways not yet passed. . . . Orphan Trains is a moving and instructive story, and as he tells it, Mr. O'Connor never loses sight of the real people and real lives at its center."--Richard Bernstein "New York Times"
O'Connor tells these stories lucidly and gracefully. He is particularly evocative in his descriptions of the transportation conditions the children endured, the conditions of urban poverty in New York in the 1800s, and of a typical day of a New York newsboy.

--Ruth Wallis Herndon "New York Times Book Review"

--Merle Rubin "Los Angeles Times"