Lillian Ross was born Lillian Rosovsky in Syracuse, New York on June 8, 1918. She received a bachelor's degree from Hunter College in New York and later did graduate work at Cornell University. Her first job in journalism was as a reporter for the New York tabloid PM. In 1945, she started working for The New Yorker and worked there for more than six decades. Her last writing for the magazine appeared online in 2012 as a blog post about J. D. Salinger. Her last New Yorker article in print was a Talk of the Town piece in 2011 about the comedian and actor Robin Williams. Her article describing John Huston's effort to make a film of The Red Badge of Courage was reprinted as a book entitled… Picture in 1952. She wrote several books about journalism including Reporting and Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism. She also wrote a memoir entitled Here but Not Here: A Love Story, which described her 50-year love affair with editor of The New Yorker William Shawn and a collection of her journalism entitled Reporting Always. She died from a stroke on September 20, 2017 at the age of 99.
David Remnick was born on October 29, 1958 in Hackensack, N.J. and educated at Princeton University. He began his career at the Washington Post in 1982. In 1992, he became a staff writer for the New Yorker. Remnick's book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction. The work deals with the last days of the Soviet Union, which Remnick witnessed firsthand as foreign correspondent to Moscow from the Washington Post. Remnick is the author of other works including The Devil Problem (And Other True Stories) published in 1996 and Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia in 1997. His most recent work, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and… the Rise of an American Hero, was published in 1998.
American novelist, poet, and critic John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1932. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard University, which he attended on a scholarship, in 1954. After graduation, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. After returning from England in 1955, he worked for two years on the staff of The New Yorker. This marked the beginning of a long relationship with the magazine, during which he has contributed numerous short stories, poems, and book reviews. Although Updike's first published book was a collection of verse, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), his… renown as a writer is based on his fiction, beginning with The Poorhouse Fair (1959). During his lifetime, he wrote more than 50 books and primarily focused on middle-class America and their major concerns---marriage, divorce, religion, materialism, and sex. Among his best-known works are the Rabbit tetrology---Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1988). Rabbit, Run introduces Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as a 26-year-old salesman of dime-store gadgets trapped in an unhappy marriage in a dismal Pennsylvania town, looking back wistfully on his days as a high school basketball star. Rabbit Redux takes up the story 10 years later, and Rabbit's relationship with representative figures of the 1960s enables Updike to provide social commentary in a story marked by mellow wisdom and compassion in spite of some shocking jolts. In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry is comfortably middle-aged and complacent, and much of the book seems to satirize the country-club set and the swinging sexual/social life of Rabbit and his friends. Finally, in Rabbit at Rest, Harry arrives at the age where he must confront his mortality. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. Updike's other novels range widely in subject and locale, from The Poorhouse Fair, about a home for the aged that seems to be a microcosm for society as a whole, through The Court (1978), about a revolution in Africa, to The Witches of Eastwick (1984), in which Updike tries to write from inside the sensibilities of three witches in contemporary New England. The Centaur (1963) is a subtle, complicated allegorical novel that won Updike the National Book Award in 1964. In addition to his novels, Updike also has written short stories, poems, critical essays, and reviews. Self-Consciousness (1989) is a memoir of his early life, his thoughts on issues such as the Vietnam War, and his attitude toward religion. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. He died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009 at the age of 76.