Bill LeFurgy Biography

Bill LeFurgy is a historian and author who writes fiction and nonfiction about America’s Gilded Age and Jazz Age. After a long career in archives and historical research — including years as a historian at the Library of Congress — he now writes full-time about the crime, culture, and celebrity of the years between roughly 1900 and 1930.

A career in archives and history

Bill spent more than three decades as an archivist and historian. He began at the Maryland Historical Society and then moved to the Baltimore City Archives, writing guides to the city’s records and early government. He later worked at the National Archives and Records Administration, and spent the later part of his career at the Library of Congress, helping build the national program for preserving digital information.

What he’s researching now

Today Bill’s research centers on the entertainment world of the 1910s and 1920s — above all the Ziegfeld Follies and the photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston, whose portraits defined the era’s image of glamour. He is building a catalog of Johnston’s Ziegfeld and theatrical photographs, reconstructing who the performers were and how celebrity and spectacle took shape on Broadway and beyond. That work feeds his essays on Salomania, burlesque, silent film, and the making of modern celebrity — as well as his historical mystery novels, including Into the Suffering City and Murder in the Haunted Chamber. Bill lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with his wife and two cats.