Robert Sklar was born in 1936 and was educated in the public schools of Long Beach, California, and at Princeton University. After working as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, he received his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University in 1965. He is a historian and writer on twentieth-century American culture and society, and is the author of *F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoön* and editor of *The Plastic Age*, an anthology on 1920s culture. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and has taught overseas in New Zealand and Japan. A faculty member at the University of Michigan, he lives in Ann Arbor, and is the father of two children.