William Farina
William Edward Farina is an American essayist and writer of popular non-fiction.
Biography
Farina was born, reared and educated in LaPorte, Indiana. He attended Valparaiso University on a baseball athletic scholarship and received his bachelor's degree with a double major in English and Philosophy in 1978, then a J.D. degree from the same institution in 1981. That same year he was admitted to the Illinois bar and moved to Chicago, pursuing a full-time career as a real estate analyst that had previously begun in college. In 1989, he was awarded designated membership with the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers. The following year, Farina was presented with a certificate of merit from Landmarks Illinois for his efforts in the field of historic building preservation. Soon afterwards in 1991, he married Marion Buckley of Decatur, Illinois, who helped to rekindle his interest in writing. Then in 2002, he accepted invitational membership with Lambda Alpha International, an honorary land economics society.Farina and his wife participated as volunteers for the 2008 general election campaign in his native state of Indiana. Soon after this in 2009, they moved to northern Wisconsin, where they spent the next six years serving in various government-related capacities, before moving back to the Chicago area in 2015, where they live and work today.
Broad contrasts in ethnic and cultural identities frequently characterize his writing style.
Writing career
Spurred by the results of the 2004 elections, Farina resolved to devote spare time to educational activities. Foremost among these has been a series of books on various scholarly topics, written from a layman's perspective. Farina's first collection, "De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon", addresses the Shakespeare authorship question. It won the 2007 Award for Scholarly Excellence presented by the Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference of Concordia University-Portland, and earned praise in Washington State University's Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. Since then, McFarland has published eleven additional works by Farina, with a 13th currently under contract for 2026.Works
De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the CanonUlysses S. Grant, 1861-1864: His Rise from Obscurity to Military Greatness
Perpetua of Carthage: Portrait of a Third-Century Martyr
Chrétien de Troyes and the Dawn of Arthurian Romance
Eliot Asinof and the Truth of the Game: A Critical Study of the Baseball Writings
The German Cabaret Legacy in American Popular Music
Man Writes Dog: Canine Themes in Literature, Law and Folklore
The Afterlife of Adam Smith: The Influence, Interpretation and Misinterpretation of His Economic Philosophy
Saint James the Greater in History, Art and Culture
Italian Crime Fiction in the Era of the Anti-Mafia Movement
Screening Charles Dickens: A Survey of the Film and Television Adaptations
''Florence Price: The Life, Compositions, and Influence of a Black American Composer''