author

Oliver Schoonmaker

1882–1968

Best known as the co-author of a World War I-era training manual, he also moved through very different worlds as a teacher, businessman, and student of Theosophy. His life suggests a practical mind with wide-ranging interests, from military instruction to philosophy.

1 Audiobook

Military Instructors Manual

Military Instructors Manual

by J. P. (James Perry) Cole, Oliver Schoonmaker

About the author

Born in Hurley, New York, in 1882, Oliver James Schoonmaker studied first at Rutgers and then at Harvard, and later taught mathematics at Moses Brown School in Providence and at the American University of Beirut. FamilySearch records place his birth on October 24, 1882, and show that he married Edith Lillian Whitney in 1910 and later lived in Massachusetts, New York City, and California.

Book history sources firmly connect him with Military Instructors Manual (1917), credited by the Library of Congress and Project Gutenberg to J. P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker. In that context he is identified as a major, which fits the book's practical focus on training officers during the World War I period.

Other biographical sources describe him as a longtime believer in Theosophy, and a family memorial notes that he later served as president of W. F. Whitney Manufacturing Company. He died in California in 1968 at age 85, leaving behind a life that blended education, military work, business, and philosophical interests.