A 1941 Oldsmobile plays a major role in this wry coming-of-age saga in mid-century Milwaukee.

Blue Beast Saga follows Ronald Brewer, a Milwaukee college student in the mid-1950s, through a two-year interlude between his buying and selling his first car – a 1941 Oldsmobile which he nicknames the Blue Beast. Sub-plots include Ron’s tense relations with his father, attempts to climb the social ladder, and his and his friends' clumsy struggles to score sexual “victories” in a morass of repression and objectification.

About the author

Roger Beaumont holds B.S. (1957) and M.S. (1960) degrees from Wisconsin and a Ph. D. from Kansas State, all in history. After several years in a UW-Milwaukee-based think tank, and adjunct teaching at UW and Marquette in the late ‘60s and ‘early ‘70s, he taught history at Texas A&M University 1974 until retirement in 2003. Co-founder of the journal Defense Analysis, and author of a dozen books and monographs and over eighty book chapters and articles, he is co-author with his wife of the forthcoming Imperial Divas:The Vicereines of India.  Beaumont served as an NCO in the Army Reserve in the mid-1950s, and active duty tours as an M.P. officer in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. He has guest-lectured and consulted on defense-related matters in Europe and the United States, and was Secretary of the Navy Fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy (1989-90).   He has been a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America since 1973. His wife, Penny, is a retired academic administrator and active in local and state wide charitable and public service activities; his son, Eric, formerly Librarian at the Milwaukee County jail, is well-known on the Milwaukee and international music scenes as Eric Blowtorch; one daughter, Anne, is a partner in a New York law firm; the other, Katherine, and her husband, Greg, are administrators in social service agencies in Bryan, Texas.