Columbia University professor and New Republic columnist David Hajdu is the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and Positively 4^th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest book, The Ten-Cent Plague, chronicles the rise and fall of the comic book in the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium.