Samuel Hynes is the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of a celebrated memoir of serving as a marine pilot in World War II, Flights of Passage. His book on soldiers' accounts of twentieth-century wars, The Soldiers' Tale, won a Robert F. Kennedy Award. He was a featured commentator on Ken Burns's documentary The War. He is also the author of several works of literary criticism, including The Auden Generation and The Edwardian Turn of Mind, and a memoir, The Growing Seasons. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.