A Writer’s Journey
Dorothee Kocks is the author of two books, the historical novel The Glass Harmonica: A sensualist’s tale, and the nonfiction Dream a Little. For half her life, she took a traditional academic path. She earned a PhD in American Studies from Brown University, wrote a well-respected scholarly book, and climbed the tenure ladder at the University of Utah.
Then she picked up an accordion for the first time. Music inspired a life change that entailed traveling the world in search of old instruments, funded by various day jobs including a stint as a kitchen hand in Alaska. Dorothee’s writing has been called “rich” and “evocative.” Early reviewers praise The Glass Harmonica as an “unforgettable saga” that “perfectly combines the novelist’s and historian’s skills.”
Like the characters in her book, Dorothee has led something of an itinerant life. Born in Germany, she now lives at the foot of the Wasatch Range in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she worked as an assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of Utah. She presently mentors students throughout the U.S. by telephone with the nonprofit Western Governors University.
An Instrument of Desire
The Glass Harmonica is the story of a woman who wants desperately to live fully but also be virtuous. Banished from Corsica for “immodesty,” Chjara Vallé (listen to pronunciation) is sold as a servant to an opium addict in Paris. Music paves the way for her to flee to the New World with her lover, 
Henry Garland, a rebel son of New England Puritans. Trouble awaits as they travel the byways of the young nation, she alternately seducing and scandalizing audiences with her playing of the glass harmonica and he clandestinely selling erotic literature and other items related to the “science of sexual knowledge.”
Praised by reviewers as “bawdy, geographically vast, and sensual indeed,” Dorothee Kocks’s The Glass Harmonica explores the intimate details of early American history to craft a novel of sensuality, ecstasy and music that reads at the pace of a thriller.
