Ben Yagoda is the author or editor of 14 books, including About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, Memoir: A History, Will Rogers: A Biography, and The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing. He is a widely published journalist, and for 25 years was a professor of journalism at the University of Delaware.
While at MacDowell, he worked on a historical novel about O. Henry in New York from 1902-1905. In 2020, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to embark on this project and the Library of America published an anthology of O. Henry short stories, selected and edited by Yagoda.