Made in Wisconsin: Orson Welles

The film Citizen Cane (1941) is consistently rated the greatest motion picture of all time. If you haven't seen it, you simply must. It really is all that good.

The film's producer, director, co-writer, and lead actor was Orson Welles. And, it turns out, Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1915.

His family left Wisconsin for Chicago when he was just four years old, but returned briefly such that Orson Welles attended fourth grade in my hometown of Madison.

After that, they returned to Illinois, and Welles would evolve

into the world-renown film maker we know today.

I would like to think that, as he said the words, "Rosebud," a bit of his inspiration was the beauty and innocence of the original state of his nurture, Wisconsin.

Keith Massey was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. He has his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Biblical Hebrew, with a minor in Arabic. After 9/11, he served as an Arabic linguist at the NSA. He is currently a Latin teacher at a public high school in New Jersey.

Keith is the author of Intermediate Arabic for Dummies. His fiction novels follow the adventures of Andrew Valquist, roughly patterned after himself--a man born and raised in Wisconsin who gets pulled into the world of international intrigue. 



Keith's novels are A Place of Brightness, Amor Vincit Omnia: An Andrew Valquist Adventure, Next Stop: Spanish, and In Saecula Saeculorum.