Truman Capote (1924-1984), the novelist, journalist, and celebrated man-about-town, is best known as the author of Other Voices, Other Rooms , The Grass Harp , Breakfast at Tiffany's , and In Cold Blood . David Attie (1920-1980) was a commercial and fine art photographer, whose work was widely published in magazines and books. Attie began his photographic career as a student and protégé of influential Harper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, who had similarly mentored the careers of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Brodovitch gave Attie his first professional assignment, which was to create a series of photo montages to illustrate Capote's latest work, Breakfast at Tiffany's , for Harper's; the project was scuttled after Capote got into a dispute with the magazine. Attie's commercial work was prolific and wide-ranging - including frequent covers and spreads for Vogue , Time , Newsweek , Playboy , and Harper's ; portraits of everyone from Bobby Fischer, Lorraine Hansbury, to Leonard Bernstein, Ralph Ellison and The B∧ and his own books of photographs, 1977's Russian Self-Portraits , and 1981's Portrait: Theory (together with Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe and others). Eli Attie is a writer, producer, and former political operative. He served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, and then as Vice President Al Gore's chief White House and campaign speechwriter through Gore's concession of the 2000 presidential election, which Attie and Gore wrote together. Attie was a longtime writer on both the NBC-TV series The West Wing and the Fox-TV series House .

Attie grew up in New York City. He is a graduate of Hunter College High School and Harvard College and lives in Los Angeles. George Plimpton (1927-2003), the originator of "participatory journalism," was the editor of the Paris Review . His books include Paper Lion , Out of My League , The Bogey Man , Open Net, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch , and The X Factor .