Rick Atkinson is the best-selling author of The Long Gray Line, a narrative account about West Point's class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War; and An Army at Dawn, the first volume in the Liberation Trilogy, a narrative history of the American army in North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe during the Second World War. The Wall Street Journal called it the best World War II battle narrative since Cornelius Ryan's classics, The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far. His book about the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, In the Company of Soldiers, was published in March 2004. The New York Times Book Review called it the most intimate, vivid and well-informed account yet published on that war, and Newsweek cited it as one of the ten best books of 2004. The second volume of the Liberation Trilogy, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, was published in Oct. 2007. The New York Times called it a triumph of narrative history, elegantly written and rooted in the sight and sounds of battle. Atkinson's awards include the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting; the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service, awarded to The Post for a series of investigative articles directed and edited by Atkinson on shootings by the District of Columbia police department; the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for history; and the 1989 George Polk Award for national reporting. For the 2004-2005 academic year, Atkinson was the Gen. Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Army War College and Dickinson College.