Clark R. Mollenhoff (1921-1991), a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of eleven previous books, was a graduate of Drake University Law School. He received more than twenty-five major awards in fifty years as an investigative reporter, author, and lecturer on fraud and corruption in government and in other American institutions.

He was a native Iowan, and for more than thirty-five years was on the staff for the Des Moines Register and Tribune as an investigative reporter and Washington correspondent. As Washington bureau chief for the Des Moines Register in 1973, Mr. Mollenhoff first became acquainted with, and fascinated by, the story of the invention of the world’s first digital computer at Iowa State College, which he later documented in his award-winning book, Atanasoff, Forgotten Father of the Computer.

For the past thirteen years he was a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and he continued to work as an investigative reporter in Washington, as an author, and as a legal consultant. Ballad to an Iowa Farmer and Other Reflections is his only book of poetry.