Rick Atkinson, who spent nearly 15 years working on his World War II trilogy, was a staff writer and senior editor at The Washington Post for 25 years. He is the author of The Long Gray Line, Crusade, In the Company of Soldiers, and the best-selling Liberation Trilogy: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light. A winner of Pulitzer Prizes for history and journalism, he has also won many other awards, including the George Polk Award and the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award. He lives in Washington, D.C.