Roy Reed is an author of biography of Governor Orval Faubus, renowned writer and reporter from 1956-1978 for theArkansas Gazette andThe New York Times and a journalism professor for sixteen years at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Roy Reed was born on February 14, 1930 in Hot Springs to Roy E. Reed and Ella Meredith Reed. He attended the Ouachita Baptist College in Arkadelphia, Arkansas and the University of Missouri where he earned an MA in journalism in 1954. Reed started his career as a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette in 1956 with assignments including the bureau at North Little Rock, the state Capitol, the state legislature and state politics and election campaigns. He attended Harvard University as a Nieman fellow in 1963-1964 and was hired in 1965 by theNew York Times. He reported extensively on the civil rights movement in the South. He joined the New York Times’s White House bureau and covered Presidents’ Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon Administrations. In 1969, Reed opened a New York Times bureau in New Orleans and in 1976 transferred to the Times London bureau. After his return to the United States in 1978, he taught journalism at the University of Arkansas until his retirement in 1995.

Reed is the author of Looking for Hogeye, a collection of essays about the South published in 1986 and Faubus: the Life and Time of an American Prodigal, a biography of the former governor published in 1997. Faubus was a New York Times Notable Book for 1997. In 2009, he published the edited volume Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette: An Oral History. The following year, he was awarded the Porter Prize. In 2012, he published the memoir Beware of Limbo Dancers: A correspondent’s Adventures with the New York Times.