LILLIAN ROSS (1918–2017) was born Lillian Rosovsky in Syracuse, New York. Raised in Brooklyn, she published her first piece of journalism, an article about a new library, in her junior high school newspaper. After graduating from Hunter College in 1939, Ross wrote for the leftist New York tabloid PM until she was hired by The New Yorker in 1945. She filed dispatches for the Talk of the Town section until her first major article, a 1949 profile of a matador from Brooklyn; she would go on to write more than five hundred pieces for the magazine. In 1966, she adopted a son, Erik, from Norway. Ross edited three collections of Talk of the Town feuilleton and published a dozen books, including one work of fiction, Vertical and Horizontal (1963); several anthologies of her journalism; and a memoir, Here But Not Here: A Love Story (1998), about her long relationship with William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker. In 1974, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her last piece for The New Yorker was a 2012 memoir of her friend J. D. Salinger.

ANJELICA HUSTON is an actor, director, and writer. The daughter of John Huston, she has appeared in more than fifty films, including Prizzi’s Honor (1985), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has written two volumes of memoir, A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York (2013) and Watch Me (2014).