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For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor. To create his first book, *The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York*, Caro spent seven years tracing and talking with hundreds of men and women who worked with, for, or against Robert Moses, including a score of his top aides. The book was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Caro graduated from Princeton University and later became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ina, an historian and writer.

Bruce Schulman is the author of *From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980*; *Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism*; and *The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics*. In 1989-90 he was director of the History Project in California, a joint effort of the University of California and the California State Department of Education to improve history education in the public schools. In 1993, as associate professor at UCLA, Schulman received the Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award and the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. From 1997 to 2002 he was director of the American and New England Studies Program at Boston University.

Mitchell Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is the author of *Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend*, and *Choosing Naia: A Family's Journey*, and co-author with Dick Lehr of *Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders*. His magazine work has appeared in *The New Yorker*, *Fortune* and elsewhere. As a reporter at *The Boston Globe*, Zuckoff was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for investigative reporting. He received the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Livingston Award for International Reporting, the Heywood Broun Award, and the Associated Press Managing Editors' Public Service Award. Zuckoff received a master's degree from the University of Missouri and was a Batten Fellow at the Darden School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.

As president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Jack Valenti is a leading figure in the American film and television industry's efforts to fight digital piracy. A former journalist, Valenti has written three non-fiction books - *The Bitter Taste of Glory*, *A Very Human Presiden*t, and *Speak Up With Confidence* - and the political novel, *Protect and Defend*. He earned a B.A. from the University of Houston and an M.B.A. from Harvard.

Lewis was born in New York City on March 27, 1927. He attended the Horace Mann School in New York and received his BA degree from Harvard College in 1948. Lewis won his first Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1955 as a reporter for *the Washington Daily News* before joining *The New York Times* in 1955. After joining the *The Times*, he won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for his coverage of the US Supreme Court. Lewis has written three books: *Gideon's Trumpet*, about a landmark Supreme Court case that compelled states to provide attorneys for indigent defendants; *Portrait of a Decade*, about the seismic changes in American race relations; and *Make No Law*, about Times v. Sullivan, a Supreme Court case that changed the course of First Amendment litigation in America. For 15 years, Lewis taught a course on the Constitution and the press at Harvard Law School. Last year, he was named Visiting Lombard Lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He is the author of seven novels, including *Vox* and *The Mezzanine*, and three previous works of nonfiction, including *Double Fold*, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001. He currently lives in Maine with his family.

The son of an insurance company executive, Harris Wofford grew up in New York and, after a spell of military service, attended Chicago, Yale, and the overwhelmingly black Howard University, specifically chosen to broaden his understanding of civil rights issues first-hand. Wofford published two books on world government while an undergraduate and spent a brief period as an aide to Chester Bowles before devoting himself to law practice. He joined John Kennedy's presidential campaign and, together with Bowles, drafted the Democratic platform statement on civil rights. Wofford was appointed special civil rights assistant in the Kennedy administration but became disillusioned by the pace of change and in 1962 moved to Ethiopia to head the operations of the Peace Corps. From 1966 until 1978 Wofford was primarily engaged in academic life, first as president of SUNY's progressive Old Westbury campus and then as president of Bryn Mawr. He published his memoirs *Of Kennedys and Kings*. After a brief return to private practice in Philadelphia, Wofford served as chair of the Pennsylvania state Democratic Party and was then appointed by Governor Casey to be the state Secretary of Labor and Industry. In April 1991, when Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz was killed in an air crash, Casey appointed Wofford to fill the post until a special election could be held in November. In that election Wofford emphasized the health care issue and against the odds beat Richard Thornburgh, Bush's former Attorney-General. The result was widely interpreted as an early indication of the Bush administration's weakness on domestic policy and the electoral salience of the health care issue. Democratic presidential candidates then addressed the theme of health care and for a time Wofford was spoken of as vice-presidential material for Clinton. However, Wofford himself was not able to entrench his position and in 1994 he lost the Senate seat to the young Republican candidate Rich Santorum.

Theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador, Michael Novak currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. He is the 1994 recipient of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Taylor Branch is best known for his prizewinning trilogy chronicling the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The first volume, *Parting the Waters: America in the King Years*, 1954-63, won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-Fiction in 1988. The subesquent two volumes, and *Pillar of Fire and At Canaan's Edge* also went on to win numerous awards. The author of two other nonfiction books and a novel, Branch is a former staff member of *The Washington Monthly*, *Harper's*, and *Esquire*. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.