The author of Saturday Night, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, Rin Tin Tin: the Life and the Legend, and The Orchid Thief (which became an Academy Award-winning film), describes her Cleveland childhood as “happy and uneventful…back when the Indians were still a lousy team.” Studying literature and history, she dreamt of writing long stories about interesting things but had no idea how to become a writer. There was no guidebook. So, she set off on a path to law school and a career, landing by chance in an interim gig at a now-defunct magazine, then a weekly alternative paper, and, eventually, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and The Boston Globe, before moving to New York, publishing her first book, and becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her experience is, perhaps, the best proof of the truism: to be a writer, one must write. Orlean’s newest title, The Library Book (October 2018), reopens the unsolved mystery of America’s most catastrophic library fire, underscoring and exploring the treasured place that libraries hold in our culture and in our hearts. S