John M. Barry lives in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., and is the author of the award-winning Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (1997) and The Ambition and the Power: A True Story of Washington (1989). Former Washington editor of Dun's Review, he has published articles in Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Washington Post, Esquire, and the Los Angeles Times.