Robert McGowan served during the Vietnam War as a pay disbursement specialist, stationed (1968-69) at 9th Infantry Division Headquarters in Dong Tam, on the banks of the Song My Tho in the steamy Mekong Delta southwest of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.

McGowan’s fiction and essays are published in several dozen prominent literary journals internationally, including Chautauqua Literary Journal, Connecticut Review, Etchings (Australia), The Louisiana Review, The Savage Kick (UK), and South Dakota Review. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and anthologized.

As an artist, McGowan’s work is in private, corporate, and public collections worldwide, including Bank of America, Bank of Korea, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and has appeared as interior portfolios and on the covers of American Literary Review, BRAND (UK), dotdotdash (Australia) and others. He is the author of Stories from the Art World (Thumbnail Press, 2011), a collection of eight stories with integral images taken from McGowan’s artwork.

McGowan died of cancer caused by his exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam conflict. Read his final interview about his condition here, as well as earlier interviews with both Robert and his Emmy award-winning wife Peggy.