Wolcott Gibbs and Thomas Vinciguerra

Wolcott Gibbs, born in 1902, began working at The New Yorker in 1927. A supremely gifted writer and editor, he had, by his mid-thirties, published more than a million words in the magazine, covering every section, although he was best known, in his later years, as a theater critic—and as a dramatist for his Broadway hit, "Season in the Sun". Gibbs died at the age of 56 on Fire Island.

Thomas Vinciguerra was deputy editor of the news magazine The Week for a decade from its founding in 2001. He has published articles in The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, GQ, and other periodicals. He holds degrees from Columbia College, the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He is the editor of Conversations With Elie Wiesel.

BACKWARD RAN SENTENCES: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from The New Yorker, with a Foreword by P.J. O'Rourke (Bloomsbury, 2011)