CONTRIBUTORS

John Grisham

In John Grisham's first nonfiction book, The Innocent Man, which is excerpted this month beginning on page 304, the best-selling author investigates how the American criminal-justice system went terribly wrong when Ronald Keith Williamson, a second-round Oakland Athletics draft pick in 1971, was convicted and sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. "The tragic story of Ron Williamson is far more compelling than any novel I could create," says Grisham, who practiced law in Mississippi for nearly a decade before turning to writing full-time after the wild success of his 1991 novel, The Firm. Since then, he has written 18 other books, 9 of which have been turned into movies. Grisham, a baseball enthusiast who once dreamed of playing professionally, now supports Little League activities near his homes in Mississippi and Virginia.

Heather Halberstadt and Peter Newcomb

No sooner was the 2005 New Establishment list on its way to the printer than Peter Newcomb and articles editor Heather Halberstadt began meeting with editor Graydon Carter to discuss retooling this year's. "The biggest change was expanding the list from 50 to 100 names," says senior articles editor Newcomb. "We opened it up to fashion, art, food, finance, and other industries we hadn't pulled from before." Even though some of the list's regular fixtures have been replaced in favor of fresh faces, one thing has remained constant. "There definitely is jockeying for position," says Halberstadt. "People pay attention to their ranking." Halberstadt has worked on the annual New Establishment since 1998; this is Newcomb's first go-round: the 22-year veteran of Forbes, who for 10 years oversaw the Forbes Four Hundred, joined Vanity Fair earlier this year.

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Mali Ferguson

In his 2004 book Colossus (Penguin Press), Niall Ferguson made the argument that the American empire has been blissfully unaware of its own fall. "People said, What do you mean by 'fall'?," Ferguson says. When he composed The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (due out this month from Penguin Press), he had not forgotten the incredulous reaction. "Part of this book is to show why decline is not always obvious to the people who are living through it." In "Empire Falls," page 222, Ferguson makes his case. "The conventional wisdom is that the last hundred years witnessed a triumph of the West. I want to turn that around and argue that the zenith of Western power was actually around 1900, and it's been a bumpy descent ever since."

David Kamp

Contributing editor David Kamp describes The United States ofArugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation, his new book, being published this month by Broadway Books, as "the story of how America came to care about food, how food in America became so much better and so much more culturally important." An admitted foodie, Kamp says he wrote the book, excerpted in this issue ("Cooking Up a Storm," page 310), because he was desperate for just such a story. "A lot of the figures who shaped the way we eat are, to me, as significant as Lennon and McCartney, Hemingway, or Georgia O'Keeffe," says Kamp. "I think for too long that significance has been undervalued. I hope this book redresses that, and I also hope it's a super-entertaining read."

A. A. Gill

Newspaper columnist and Vanity Fair contributing editor A. A. Gill is most famous for the provocative opinions, sharp wit, and strong sense of humor brought to his travel writing and restaurant reviews. For this month's issue, Gill pits his infallible honesty against a fearsome opponent: New York's real-estate market. Writing about what he calls the "New New York" and the "insecure, design-anemic rich," Gill pulls no punches in revealing that the lion's share of the resources in the condominium boom is not going into a better bathroom. "Most of the money," Gill says, "is spent on sending you a brochure to make you think you are getting a nicer bathroom. It's a huge P.R. exercise."

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William J. Mann

What most interested Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn author William J. Mann about his subject, the late, great Katharine Hepburn, was the real person behind the Hollywood legend. "I was struck by how the private Kate was even more interesting and inspiring than her public image. She was more honest, more sophisticated, and more ambitious than she let on. People forget how unpopular she was in the 1930s. She really rubbed against the grain of the culture," says Mann. "Hepburn overcame this with a shrewd understanding of what fame meant and what she needed to do to maintain that kind of fame." While researching and writing the book, Mann found letters and materials that had never been previously consulted, but the greatest reward for the author was winning the trust of so many of Hepburn's friends and family: "It was a great honor to get to know them."

Craig Brown

For nearly two decades, Craig Brown has parodied virtually every fabulous and rotten Briton worthy of mention for Private Eye magazine. Starting this month, Vanity Fair's new contributing editor will be making his note-perfect comic renditions of celebrities—"As Told to Craig Brown"—a recurring staple of the Vanities section of the magazine. His first target? Ann Coulter (Diary, page 268), who made quite an impression on him. "You don't get these kind of people in England who think they bypass Christ," says Brown. "There really is no such thing as the religious right there." But after he accumulated a small library of Coulter's books and television appearances, another problem emerged: "With people like Coulter, who are already parodies of themselves, you sort of have to make them appear as less of a joke than they really are."

Isaiah Wilner

"They were fierce rivals, but at the end of the day they were the closest of friends," says Isaiah Wilner of the fascinating relationship between Time magazine co-founders Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, which Wilner chronicles in his book, The Man Time Forgot (HarperCollins, October), excerpted in this issue, page 206. "The tragedy is that Luce wasn't able to credit Hadden for creating Time, because Hadden's legacy threatened Luce's own view of himself. But that shouldn't outweigh the genius of what they accomplished together. It was only through rivalry that they could make this great cultural product." Like Hadden, Wilner was editor of the Yale Daily News.

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Scott Anderson and Paolo Pellegrin

For this issue, Scott Anderson and photographer Paolo Pellegrin report from Egypt (page 296), where they found a country divided by two very different sets of rules: one for the urban elite and intelligentsia, the other for everyone else. "Those in the first group are allowed a considerable degree of political freedom, so in listening only to them it is easy to imagine that Egypt is growing increasingly progressive and democratic," Anderson says. "No such freedoms, however, extend to the vast majority of Egyptians, who are poor and struggling and have virtually no future." Anderson and Pellegrin, who collaborated on V.F.'s February 2005 article about the Gaza Strip ("Gaza's Grand Delusion"), were recently covering the conflict in southern Lebanon when a drone-fired missile missed their car by 20 feet. (Both men suffered mild concussions because of the blast's proximity.) The incident emphasized the importance of the reporter-photographer relationship. "You need to have the person you are sharing the experience with and making decisions with be on the same page with you. I have that with Scott," Pellegrin says.

FOR DETAILS, SEE CREDITS PAGE

Natasha Stovall

Before any issue of Vanity Fair hits the newsstands, associate legal-affairs editor Natasha Stovall works with the magazine's writers, editors, fact-checkers, lawyers, and legal-affairs editor, Robert Walsh, to ensure that articles are tightly sourced and defensible in a court. "I learn a lot in my job," says Stovall, who started at V.F. as a fact-checker in 1999. work with top-notch people who are in command of their craft, and I get to see how journalism is done at high levels." Stovall, a Washington, D.C., native who grew up around the media (her mother was an editor at The Washington Post), enjoys getting this behind-thescenes reporting. really working on I learn about a world that I didn't know anything about before."