Kevin Corley

While teaching history in Christian County, Illinois to many of the descendants of the coal mine wars, historian Kevin Corley mined the rich archives of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum to portray the lives of mining families during these turbulent times. The oral histories of surviving miners that he collected were used by Carl Oblinger to write Divided Kingdom, a history of the coal mine wars which was published in 1991. These interviews are available on-line through the University of Illinois in Springfield’s Archive collection. Corley earned a BA in social science in 1976 from Eastern Illinois University and a master’s degree in history in 1988 from the University of Illinois in Springfield. While teaching history students in the 1990s, Corley told his students of the numerous unsolved murders, gunfights, and bombings that had taken place in their community. Some of them said, “Mr. Corley, that could never have happened. If it had it would be a book or a movie.” So, upon his retirement in 2013, Corley wrote Sixteen Tons and e-mailed it to his family and former students in WORD format. Somehow, publisher Tim Sheard of Hard Ball Press in Brooklyn got hold of it and in December called him and said he wanted to publish it. Sheard had it in print by April, 2014 and its sequel Throw Out the Water by 2016 By 2024 Corley has six published historical novels set in Illinois between 1898 and 1938. Three of his novels involve bloody coal mine wars. Three other novels deal with bootleggers, some of which also robbed banks and committed atrocious murders such as the St. Valentine's Day massacre during the Prohibition years of the 1920s and 1930s. While all six of his novels overlap the best order to read the coal mine war books is Sundown Town, then Sixteen Tons, and then Throw Out the Water. The bootlegging novels are best read in the following order: 13 Steps for Charlie Birger, then its sequel Bootlegger Heaven: The Shelton Gang Story, and then The American Boys: Capone's Hitmen. Corley also published one science fiction novel for his grandchildren titled The Begotten.