About the Author

Valerie Lester is an independent scholar, writer, and translator living near Boston. She is the author of Fasten Your Seat Belts! History and Heroism in the Pan Am Cabin (1995) and Phiz, The Man Who Drew Dickens (2004). She has also written a biography of the great Italian typographers: Giambattista Bodoni: His Life and His World and has translated Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes with the title: The Magnificent Meaulnes (2009).