Personal life

DePastino and his wife Stephanie live in Pittsburgh with their two children.

Education

Mt. Lebanon High School in Pittsburgh;BA in History and Philosophy from Boston College;MA and Ph.D. in American History from Yale University.

Writing career

With the birth of his first daughter in 1996, DePastino became a stay-at-home dad, teaching in the evenings at Penn State Beaver and Waynesburg College while finishing his Ph.D. He then revised his dissertation on the history of homelessness into a book, for which he won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. The result was Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (2003). After editingthe lost classic, The Road by Jack London, DePastino plunged into his Bill Mauldin research. He is nowworking on his next book, a history of the great railroad strikes and riots of 1877. His daughters, Ellie, who is fourteen, and Elizabeth, who is ten, arenow older, and he has learned to cope by volunteering, often, in their schools.