A native of South Carolina, Marshall Frady was a journalist for more than twenty-five years, writing for Newsweek, Life, Harper's, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, The Sunday Times of London, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He was a correspondent on Nightline; chief writer and host of ABC News' Closeup, for which he won two Emmys and the duPont-Columbia Award; and the author of six books: Wallace; Across a Darkling Plain: An American's Passage Through the Middle East; Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness; Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson; and Martin Luther King Jr. (The Penguin Lives Series). He died in 2004.