Richard Ben Cramer (1950-2013) was an award-winning journalist and author of five books, including the bestselling classic What It Takes (1992). A graduate of Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities, he began his career as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun in 1973 before moving to the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he received the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Middle East in 1979. His work appeared in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Esquire.