Bill Bucko has degrees in philosophy from Purdue University, and has been a Montessori teacher and computer analyst.  His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in “The Atlantean Press Review” and “The Intellectual Activist.”  His books include:

The Mysterious Valley, by Maurice Champagne (as translator),  The Atlantean Press, 1994;  

Ayn Rand’s French Children’s Magazines: The Early Inspiration of a Great Novelist,  The Ayn Rand Institute Press, 2009 (limited edition);  

and three novels set in the early Italian Renaissance:

Bring Me Giants!,  the story of an atheist scholar at the court of the first Renaissance pope in 1451;  

The Outcasts,  a free-thinking boy’s rebellious quest for truth in 1400s Florence, at the dawn of the Renaissance;  

Raphaella di Piero,  the harrowing drama of a girl whose father murdered her mother … and the boy who loves her.

Literary influences:  Ayn Rand, Victor Hugo,  Sandra Shulman’s “The Florentine,” Rafael Sabatini’s “Bellarion”