LYNNE OLSON

Lynne Olson has been a reporter and writer since shortly after her graduation from the University of Arizona. In 1971, she went to work for the Associated Press in Salt Lake City, and in 1972, transferred to the AP’s San Francisco bureau, where she specialized in feature writing. Later that same year, Olson was named to AP’s top feature writing team in New York, which focused on developing and writing stories about the country’s rapidly changing social mores. In 1973, she was asked by the AP to become the wire service’s first woman correspondent in Moscow, and she moved to the AP’s foreign desk to prepare for the assignment. She was based in Moscow from 1974 to 1976, once again concentrating on feature stories but also covering such news events as the Apollo-Soyuz space mission and President Nixon’s visit to the Soviet Union. In 1976, Olson was reassigned to Washington, where she was chosen to cover Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign.

After Carter became president, Olson joined the Washington bureau of the Baltimore Sun, where she covered national politics and eventually the White House. In 1981, she quit the Sun to become a freelance writer. She has written for such publications as American Heritage, Smithsonian, Working Woman, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Ms., Elle, Glamour, Washington Journalism Review and Baltimore Magazine. She also taught journalism for five years as an assistant professor at American University in Washington.

Olson and her husband, Stanley Cloud, are co-authors of The Murrow Boys, a highly acclaimed biography of the correspondents whom Edward R. Murrow hired before and during World War II to create CBS News. The Murrow Boys was published by Houghton Mifflin in June 1996, and was named one of the best books of that year by Publishers Weekly.

Freedom’s Daughters, Olson’s second book, is the first comprehensive history of women in the civil rights movement. Published by Scribner in February 2001, it won a Christopher Award in 2002.

Olson has joined with Cloud again to write A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II, published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 2003.

The authors live in Washington, D.C. Their 20-year-old daughter, Carly, attends George Washington University.

STANLEY W. CLOUD

Stanley Cloud was a magazine and newspaper journalist for 35 years before he turned to writing non-fiction books with his wife, Lynne Olson. Their first book was The Murrow Boys (Houghton Mifflin, 1996) about Edward R. Murrow and the correspondents he hired during World War II to help create CBS News.

In his journalistic career, Cloud was a reporter, a correspondent in the U.S. and abroad, a bureau chief, a columnist and an editor. He has covered wars, politics, the White House, Watergate, business, the courts, culture and local government. For much of his career, he was with Time magazine -– as a correspondent (San Francisco, Moscow), a bureau chief (Bangkok, Saigon, Washington) and a press columnist. He has interviewed five presidents of the United States and covered six administrations. He was the principal reporter and writer for many Time cover stories, including the now-famous "Is Government Dead?" in 1989. He was assistant managing editor and managing editor of the Washington Star from 1979 to 1982 and executive editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner from 1982 to 1986.

Cloud has written a play -– a fictionalized adaptation of the book The Murrow Boys -– that was workshopped at the Kennedy Center and presented in a staged reading at the center's AFI Theater in February 2001. He and Lynne Olson live in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. and are the parents of a 20-year-old daughter, Caroline. Cloud also has three grown sons -– Michael, David and Matthew Cloud –- by a previous marriage.