From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

Day after day last week, our staffers watched with delight as Paul Gray "covered" the Fischer-Spassky chess match from his dark, smoky office in New York City. After scanning his computer for the latest wire reports on each move in Yugoslavia, Gray would spin around in a chair, duplicate the action on a chessboard on his desk and ponder the results. In light of such fanaticism, it's hard to believe that Gray is only a casual player of the sport. "Chess is a little like ballet in that if you didn't start as a child, you're not going to be very good at it," he says. "But the infinite complexities of the game intrigue me a lot."

Pascal once said humanity gets into trouble because a man can't sit by himself in a room quietly. Pascal would have appreciated our senior writer. "Some journalists are outside people who dig where no one has gone before and can extricate truth from stones," points out Gray's longtime friend and colleague Stefan Kanfer. "And then there are the inside people who like hanging out in libraries and steeping like a tea bag in the files. Paul can interview people, but he's happiest with the door shut, reading volume upon volume and imposing his order on the chaos of information."

In the 1960s Gray was teaching English literature at Princeton but was increasingly restive. He wanted to write for larger audiences than academia provided. After joining TIME in 1972, he became one of the country's most important and prolific fiction reviewers. Gray still reads at least five books each week, even though he has lately branched out into other forms of magazine work -- recording the woes of England's royal family one week, penning a hilarious essay on politics the next. His cover-story subjects have ranged from author Gore Vidal to ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, from George Orwell to the problems of American multiculturalism.

What drives Gray to his special level of journalism? For one, the sheer brainy pleasure he gets from learning new things. But it also doesn't hurt to be the eldest child (of five) of a hard-driving, self-made business executive. "My father was loving and demanding; he let me know when I was falling short," says Gray. "So even now when I perform a task, the possibility of failing is very real. And almost no story I finish meets my ideal of that thing I saw flashing ahead of me when I sat down to write." We sympathize, but fortunately for us, virtually everything Gray writes meets our standard for first-rate journalism.