About the Author

For 25 years Ed Williams was editor of the editorial pages at The Charlotte Observer, where his columns and editorials were part of projects that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1981 and 1988. He earned a B.A. in history from the University of Mississippi, where he edited the Daily Mississippian. He served two years in the U.S. Army and in 1967 joined Hodding Carter's Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, as a reporter. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a writer for the Ford Foundation before coming to the Observer as an editorial writer in 1973. He retired in 2008 and was inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife, Marylyn.