Robert Cowley is an authority on American and European military history whose writing spans the Civil War to World War II. He has held several senior positions in book and magazine publishing and is the founding editor of the award-winning MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Cowley has also written and edited three collections of essays in counterfactual history known as What If?, and he is the author of the forthcoming book The Killing Season, a history of the first Battle of Ypres and the beginning of World War I. As part of his research, he drove and walked the entire length of the Western Front. He lives in Newport, Rhode Island.