Eugene Walter, a novelist and poet, was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1922. During the Second World War, he served as a military cryptographer in Alaska. Shortly after the war, he worked for the New York Public Library and designed sets for Broadway shows. In 1956, he moved to Italy where he translated movie scripts and became friends with Italian director Federico Fellini. He returned to Mobile in 1976 where he continued to write ballads and cookbooks and translated other screenplays, books, and poems from French, Italian, and German into English. He was the winner of the Lippincott Award, Sewanee Rockefeller Fellowship, and the O. Henry Citation for his short stories. He was also the founding contributor to The Paris Review. Walter died on March 29, 1998, at age 76 of liver cancer in Mobile.