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 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 the New York Times. Some of Reeds most acclaimed journalism was work done while covering 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 continued to be a productive writer after retirement from academic life. Faubus: the Life and Time of an American Prodigal, a biography of the controversial former governor was 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 whit the New York Times. On December 10, 2017, Reed died following a stroke.