VICTOR S. NAVASKY, the longtime editor and publisher (and now publisher emeritus) of The Nation, is chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review and was the founder of Monocle magazine. His books include Kennedy Justice, Naming Names, A Matter of Opinion, and (with Christopher Cerf) The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation and Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq.
LYNN NESBIT is a literary agent in New York City.
JANET NOBLE laid out issues of The Paris Review in the early 1980s, during the last days of “cut and paste” production. She is a playwright and screenwriter living in New York City and working part time at The New York Review of Books.
P. J. O’ROURKE is the former editor of the National Lampoon. He spent fifteen years as a foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone and currently writes for The Weekly Standard and the Atlantic. He is the author of twelve books, including, most recently, On “The Wealth of Nations.”
RON PADGETT’s most recent books of poems are How to Be Perfect and You Never Know. He is also the author of Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers.
MAGGIE PALEY worked closely with George on The Paris Review and other projects during the 1960s. She’s the author of Bad Manners, a novel, The Book of the Penis, nonfiction, Elephant, a chapbook of sestinas, and many magazine articles and book reviews.
ROBERT PARKS is director of Library and Museum Services at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
DEBORAH PEASE met George Plimpton at a debutante party in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1961. Her books include Real Life, a novel (Norton, 1971), and Another Ghost in the Doorway: Collected Poems (Moyer Bell, 1999). From 1982 to 1992, she was publisher of The Paris Review.
FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON was George’s first wife and the mother of their daughter, Medora, and son, Taylor. She lives on a pond in Bridgehampton, New York, where she is an avid bird-watcher and nature lover. She is an artist and photographer who especially enjoys the company of her children and grandchildren.
LAURA AND OLIVIA PLIMPTON are George and Sarah Plimpton’s daughters, fourteen years old, attending school in Manhattan.
MEDORA PLIMPTON, the eldest child of George’s first marriage, lives in Starksboro, Vermont, with her husband, Spencer Harris, and children, Addison and Tanner. She is pursuing a career in nursing and enjoys volunteering as an EMT-I for a local ambu-lance. Medora is an avid skier and cherishes spending time with her family in the outdoors.
OAKES PLIMPTON, born in 1933, is George’s youngest brother, retired now, but still active in farming enterprises, coordinating the local farmers’ market in Arlington, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife, Pat Magee; his son, Robin Plimpton-Magee, lives in New York.
RUTH TALBOT PLIMPTON was married to Francis Plimpton’s half-brother, Calvin. She is the author of Mary Dyer: Biography of a Rebel Quaker. She lives in Westwood, Massachusetts.
SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON is George’s second wife and the mother of their twin daughters, Laura and Olivia. She likes to think her early jobs in wilderness survival, special events, and publishing were excellent training for life with George. She has edited a posthumous collection of his writing, The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair.
SARAH GAY PLIMPTON is George’s only sister. After majoring in biology in college, she went on to medical school. After three years, she took a year off to reconsider, and George suggested she work for The Paris Review in Paris. She worked with Patrick Bowles (then the Paris editor of the Review) for two years, 1962–1964. Then she began to write and paint, which she continues to do in New York City.
TAYLOR PLIMPTON, George’s son by Freddy Espy, is a freelance writer in New York City.
MICHAEL POLLAN interned at The Paris Review in 1974. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which are In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, named one of the ten best books of 2006 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Pollan is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and is a Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.
RICHARD PRICE is the author of eight novels, including The Wanderers, Clockers, and Lush Life, and the screenwriter of ten feature films including The Color of Money and Sea of Love. He was a co -writer on the HBO series The Wire.
TERRY QUINN is a novelist, biographer, playwright, and opera librettist. He co-authored, with George Plimpton, two dramatic dialogues that have toured the United States and Europe. George played the role of critic Edmund Wilson in three productions of his play Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Friendship and the Feud.
JACK RICHARDSON, a critic and playwright, lives in New York City.
JAMES RIGHTER is an architect practicing in Boston.
ANNE ROIPHE is the author of the novels Up the Sandbox and Lovingkindness, the memoir, 1185 Park Avenue, and many columns and essays, chiefly from a feminist perspective.
PAT RYAN followed Ray Cave as George’s editor at Sports Illustrated. After leaving SI, where she had been a researcher, writer, and senior editor, she was the first woman to edit a Time Inc. weekly (People), and at the end of the ’80s, was the editor of the monthly Life.
DEWITT SAGE is a prizewinning (two Peabody Awards) documentary filmmaker. Much of his work has been for PBS’s American Masters series (“Winter Dreams,” on F. Scott Fitzgerald) and for WGBH’s Frontline series (“Broken Minds,” on the treatment and mistreatment of schizophrenia).
JAMES SALTER is the author of The Hunters, which drew on his experience as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, A Sport and a Pastime, published by Paris Review Editions, and Dusk and Other Stories, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1989.
ARAM SAROYAN’s poems have been extensively anthologized. His most recent collection is Complete Minimal Poems. He has also written a memoir of his father, William Saroyan.
ELISSA SCHAPPELL was senior editor of The Paris Review in the early 1990s. She is an author, essayist, and cofounder of the literary magazine Tin House. She resides in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
MONA ESPY SCHREIBER is Freddy Espy Plimpton’s twin sister. She was married to a diplomat and lived all over the world. Now divorced, she is the mother of four children. She has a BA in English from Tulane University and has worked mostly in educational and nonprofit institutes.
GENE SCOTT was tagged with three labels: “Tennis’s Renaissance Man,” “the most controversial figure in the game,” and “the conscience of tennis.” He was a member of the U.S. Davis Cup team, and was inducted posthumously into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2008. He died in 2006.
JEANETTE SEAVER has written four cookbooks, including Jea -nette’s Secrets of Everyday Good Cooking and, most recently, My New Mediterranean Cookbook. She is the wife of Richard Seaver, and, with him, publisher of Arcade books.
RICHARD SEAVER was a founding editor of Merlin in Paris in the 1950s, where he first met George. For many years, before foundinmentng Arcade Publishing with his wife, Jeanette, he was the editor of Grove Press and of the Evergreen Review. He has also edited collections of the works of Samuel Beckett and André Breton. He and his wife live in New York City.
TIM SELDES met George at Exeter, where they were the starting pitchers on the only freshman class baseball team ever to finish higher than fourth place. Seldes went to work at the literary agency that represented George’s literary work, and they remained connected until his too-early death.
MARY LEE SETTLE was the author of eleven novels, including the Beulah Quintet saga and Blood Tie, which won the National Book Award in 1978. In her youth, as a New York actress and model, she tested for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. She died in 2005.
LAWRENCE SHAINBERG’s novel Memories of Amnesia was edited by George Plimpton and published by Paris Review Editions in 1988. He is also the author of the novel One on One; a nonfiction book, Brain Surgeon; and a memoir, Ambivalent Zen; as well as a Paris Review essay, “Exorcising Beckett.”
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DWIN (“BUD”) SHRAKE is a novelist, screenwriter, former newspaper columnist, and longtime feature writer for Sports Illustrated. He became friends with Plimpton at the Ali-Liston fight in Miami in 1964. Shrake lives in Austin, Texas.
ROBERT SILVERS cofounded The New York Review of Books with the late Barbara Epstein in 1963 and continues to be its editor. He was Paris editor of The Paris Review and is a member of its editorial board. Last year Silvers received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Harvard University.
MONA SIMPSON was senior editor of The Paris Review in the early 1980s. She is the author of four novels: Anywhere but Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, and Off Keck Road.
FARWELL SMITH was a classmate of George’s at Exeter and Harvard, where they worked on the Lampoon together. He is a rancher and land preservation activist in Montana.
WALTER SOHIER was a lawyer who practiced most recently at the bar of the International Court of Criminal Justice in The Hague.
NILE SOUTHERN is a writer and filmmaker living in Boulder, Colorado. He is coeditor with Josh Alan Friedman of Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950–1995, and author of The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy.
NANCY STODDART met George when she was still in high school through Christopher Cerf, who was a friend of a classmate’s older sister. She went to Sarah Lawrence College, worked in the fashion business in Rome and Paris, and returned to New York to marry Peter Huang. George gave Nancy her wedding party at his house. She then went to work at Atlantic Records. After her divorce and career in the music business, which included being a BMI-affiliated songwriter, she moved to California to write scripts and was employed by HBO to write a biopic. She is a Writers Guild of America member and has been hired to write other scripts, which were unproduced, including one for Barry Sonnenfeld. She went back to decorating starting in the 1980s. She is still a designer today.
PATRICIA STORACE is the author of Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece; Heredity, a book of poems; and Sugar Cane, a children’s book.
ROSE STYRON, widow of the late novelist, is a poet, journalist, and human rights activist.
WILLIAM STYRON, a native of the Virginia Tidewater, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, This Quiet Dust, Darkness Visible, and A Tidewater Morning. He lived, with his wife, Rose, for most of his adult life in Roxbury, Connecticut, and in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. He died in 2007.
REMAR SUTTON was a columnist for The Washington Post and is the author of five fiction and nonfiction books. Sutton is founder of several national consumer rights task forces, and lives in the British Virgin Islands and Denmark.
JAMES SYMINGTON, a St. Bernard’s classmate of George’s, served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Missouri’s Second District as a Democrat, after holding several other posts in government, including U.S. Chief of Protocol in the Johnson White House. He is a lawyer in Washington, D.C.
GAY TALESE is the author of twelve books, including A Writer’s Life, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and The Bridge. He knew George Plimpton beginning in 1957. He and his wife, Nan, live in New York City.
MICHAEL M. THOMAS first met George Plimpton in the late 1950s and they remained good friends thereafter. Thomas has been a museum curator, an investment banker, and, since 1980, a writer. He has published seven novels and contributed to innumerable periodicals, including The Paris Review. From 1987 to 2004, he wrote a weekly column, “The Midas Watch,” for The New York Observer.
JOHN TRAIN succeeded George in 1949 as president of the Harvard Lampoon. After receiving an MA in comparative literature, he moved to Paris and became a founder and managing editor of The Paris Review. Train’s more than four hundred columns and twenty books cover such subjects as investments, foreign policy, naval war-fare, and Oriental rug symbols.
CALVIN TRILLIN has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1963. He lives in New York.
NANCY TUCKERMAN was the longtime spokeswoman for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, her former roommate at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. She was White House staff coordinator during the Kennedy administration. With Nancy Dunnan, she revised and updated The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette in 1995.
RUSTY UNGER (GUINZBURG) has been a New York–based magazine and book editor and writer, as well as a film executive. She has written for television, motion pictures, and many national publications.
WANDA URBANSKA, with her husband, Frank Levering, runs a large cherry and apple orchard in North Carolina. She is also an editor, publisher, and writer of books for people who are looking for a simpler life.
TEDDY VAN ZUYLEN, after many years of living in Paris and the Netherlands, now lives in London, where he is writing a memoir of his parents.
GORE VIDAL is an acknowledged master of the satirical, historical, and political novel (often all three at once), a list of which would deprive other contributors of their due fragment of space. His critical essays on literature and political culture, most recently Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, continue to delight readers and enrage the powers that be.
LILLIAN VON NICKERN was the business manager of The Paris Review from George’s move to New York in 1954 until her recent retirement.
HALLIE GAY WALDEN is producer of a forthcoming PBS documentary on the Thoroughbred. A Dartmouth College and Columbia Law graduate, Ms. Walden was managing editor of The Paris Review (1980–1985).
ANTONIO WEISS is the publisher of The Paris Review and an investment banker with Lazard Frères in Paris. He was George’s “aide-de-camp” and an editor at the Review in the late 1980s.
EDMUND WHITE is best known for the gay trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and A Farewell Symphony. He teaches writing at Princeton.
KATE ROOSEVELT WHITNEY has been a teacher of young children and is a social worker.
DALLAS WIEBE is the author of many works of fiction, including Skyblue the Badass, published in 1969 by Paris Review Editions. He won the Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction in 1978.
ANN WINCHESTER studied sculpture at Oxford and worked in Paris on large civic sculptures for Paris, Buenos Aires, and San Francisco. She met George in 1971 during the filming of Plimpton! Adventures in Africa. She now lives in London and is directing an animated musical drama, This Immortal Coil.
KRISTI WITKER was a reporter for CBS News and ABC News and an anchor and reporter for WPIX in New York. Her articles and photographs have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines.
ELIZABETH WURTZEL’s journalism has appeared in New York and The New Yorker, and she has published three books: Prozac Nation, Bitch, and More, Now, Again. She lives in Greenwich Village.
WARREN YOUNG, after happily enduring the Dynamite Museum disaster, less happily saw to the development and abandonment of a Sunday supplement, Three to Get Ready, by its corporate sponsor, CBS. Since then, for twenty-seven years he has been running the publishing efforts of the Boy Scouts of America, located in Irving, Texas.
BOBBY ZAREM is a publicist, best known for having created and executed the “I Love New York” campaign, which, he likes to think, literally saved the city of New York. His clients have included Dustin Hoffman, Cher, Diane Keaton, Diana Ross, and Michael Douglas, among many others. He was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, and graduated from Andover and Yale.
JAMES ZUG is the author of four books, most recently The Guard -ian: The History of South Africa’s Extraordinary Anti-Apartheid Newspaper. He was a reader at The Paris Review from 1997 to 1999.
Books by GEORGE PLIMPTON
The Rabbit’s Umbrella (juvenile)
Out of My League
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Volumes I–IX (ed.)
Paper Lion
The Bogey Man
American Literary Anthology, Volumes I
–III (ed.)
American Journey: The Times of Robert F. Kennedy (with Jean Stein)
Pierre’s Book (ed.)
Mad Ducks and Bears
One for the Record
One More July (with Bill Curry)
Shadow Box
Sports (with Neil Leifer)
A Sports Bestiary (with Arnold Roth)
Edie: An American Biography (with Jean Stein)
D.V. (with Christopher Hemphill)
Fireworks: A History and Celebration
Open Net
The Curious Case of Sidd Finch
Poets at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (ed.)
Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (ed.)
The Best of Plimpton
Chronicles of Courage (with Jean Kennedy Smith)
The Writer’s Chapbook
The Paris Review Anthology (ed.)
The Norton Book of Sports (ed.)
George, Being George Page 39