Buzz Bissinger (left) and Tony La Russa

A native of New York City, Bissinger has been the winner of such prestigious awards as the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award and the National Headliners Award. He has also been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Remarkably varied in his writing skills, Bissinger has been a reporter at some of the nation's most prestigious newspapers; a magazine writer with published work in Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine and Sports Illustrated; an author of three highly acclaimed non-fiction books, and a co-producer and writer for the ABC television drama NYPD Blue.

Bissinger graduated from Andover in 1972 and the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. His career started at the Ledger-Star in Norfolk, VA. He then moved to the St. Paul Pioneer Press and later the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was at the Inquirer in 1987 that he and two other reporters won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting for a six-part series on the Philadelphia Court System. Bissinger was also an investigative journalist for the Chicago Tribune.

In 1988 Bissinger left the Inquirer and moved to Odessa, Texas to write Friday Night Lights, a book about the impact of high school football on small-town life. The New York Times number one bestseller, published in 1990, has sold over 1 million copies in both hardcover and paperback and has never gone out of print. It was also the basis for the highly acclaimed film, Friday Night Lights, released in the fall of 2004.

In a ranking by the staff of Sports Illustrated of the 100 best books written on the subject of sports, either fiction and non-fiction, Friday Night Lights was named the fourth best sports book ever and the best ever written on the subject of football. ESPN, in its ranking, called Friday Night Lights the best sports book of the past 25 years. It has been required reading at hundreds of high schools and colleges around the country.

Friday Night Lights was a required reading for this year's incoming freshmen at Mount Union, as part of the LS 100 selected summer reading program. This is the sixth year for the summer reading assignment.

LS 100 is designed to help new students adjust to college life, learn critical reading and discussion skills and provide them with a faculty of staff members to advise them academically until they declare majors and are assigned an advisor within the academic department.

Bissinger has also received critical acclaim for A Prayer for the City, hailed as a classic on politics and urban America, and Three Nights in August, about major league baseball and the timeless beauty of the game through the eyes of its most innovative manager, St. Louis Cardinals skipper Tony La Russa. His teleplay and screenwriting work includes spending the 2000-2001 television season in Los Angeles as a co-producer and writer for NYPD Blue, and he serves as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine.

Fifty years old, Bissinger lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Lisa Smith, and is the father of three children, Gerry, Zachary and Caleb.