John Romano, a writer-producer for movies and television, holds a PhD from Yale. In 1980 he published Dickens and Reality, a study of the novelist’s relation to nineteenth-century Continental realism. He has been a writer for more than a dozen TV shows, including Hill Street Blues (Emmy® nomination for the show’s final episode), L.A. Law, American Dreams, Party of Five, Third Watch, and Monk, as well as creating three series of his own, including Michael Hayes, with David Caruso. His screenwriting credits include The Third Miracle and Intolerable Cruelty. He has adapted Philip Roth’s American Pastoral for Lynda Obst and director Philip Noyce, and Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer. In recent years, he has lectured at the National Endowment for the Humanities; at Princeton, where he was the Eberhard Faber Fellow in l999; and at MIT; as well as appearing before the House Committee on International Affairs just after September 11, 2001, on the dubious topic of Hollywood’s role in America’s image abroad. Currently he serves on the board of the Center for Arts and Culture in Washington, D.C.