Homer Bigart is regarded as one America's most accomplished war correspondents. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he covered World War II and the Korean War for the New York Herald Tribune, and later spent six months in Vietnam for The New York Times. He was a member of the "Writing 69th," the group of reporters selected to accompany Allied crews on bombing missions over Europe during World War II, and was well known among his peers for his willingness to put himself in harm's way.

Later, in Korea and Vietnam, Bigart's tough, skeptical reporting and his lean, muscular prose set the benchmark for a younger generation of reporters, and helped to shape the critical brand of coverage that came to define the journalism of the late 1960s and 70s. To many of his peers, Homer Bigart was nothing short a legend, the quintessential "reporter's reporter." He died in 1991.