Roy Blount Jr. is the author of 19 previous books, most recently Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans. He is a panelist on NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me, a columnist for Oxford American, a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly, and president of the Authors Guild. TIME puts him squarely "in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H.L. Mencken and W.C. Fields." He lives in western Massachusetts.