Authors & Illustrators represented by Don Congdon Associates

A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for her Village Voice column about advertising, Savan is the author of Slam Dunks and No Brainers: Pop Language in Your Life, the Media, and, Like...Whatever and The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV, and American Culture. She blogs regularly for The Nation about media and politics and has been widely published, including in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York, Mother Jones, and Huffington Post. Leslie lives in New Jersey with her husband and son.

Jack Warner Schaefer (1907-1991) was an American writer known for his Westerns. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he graduated from Oberlin College in 1929 with a major in English. He attended graduate school at Columbia University from 1929–30, but left without completing his Master of Arts degree. He then went to work for the United Press. In his long career as a journalist, he would hold editorial positions at many eastern publications. Schaefer's first success as a novelist came in 1949 with his memorable novel Shane, set in Wyoming. Few realized that Schaefer himself had never been anywhere near the west. Nevertheless, he continued writing successful westerns, selling his home in Connecticut and moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1955. Schaefer wrote many thoroughly researched western novels, as well as collections of fiction and non-fiction western stories.

The people about whom Jack Schaefer writes are all credible — brave, likable, touching and sometimes comic. He writes of them with humor and suspense, sentiment and tragedy, against an authentic background. His stories are written with a feeling and economy that gives them universal appeal.

Shane was adapted by Paramount Studios as a memorable motion picture in 1953. In 1975 Schaefer received the Western Literature Association's Distinguished Achievement award, and the Western Writers of America honored Schaefer with its Saddleman Award in 1986.

Richard Schickel (1933-2017) was a film critic, biographer, documentary filmmaker, and movie historian and author of almost 40 books, including Conversations with Martin Scorcese, Elia Kazan, Clint Eastwood, and The Disney Version. His 30 documentaries include Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin; Woody Allen: A Life in Film; and Keepers, a memoir. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and  the British Film Institute Book Prize, the Maurice Bessy prize for film criticism, and the William K. Everson Award for his work in film history.

Born of Jewish immigrant parents and brought up on New York's Lower East Side and in Brooklyn, Tobias Schneebaum (1922-2005) always had an insatiable desire to travel to and live in distant places, in search of the wild man. After World War II, Schneebaum studied art under Rufino Tamayo, and at Tamayo's suggestion went and lived in Mexico for three and a half years, painting, teaching, and developing an increasing interest in anthropology. In 1955 he was awarded a Fulbright grant to study in Peru, and in the course of that year descended the eastern slopes of the Andes into the jungle, where he disappeared for almost a year, living among the primitive Harakhambut. From that experience came his earlier work, whose title Keep the River on Your Right refers to the white man's last words to him as he set out from the Christian mission into that '"heart of darkness.'" Subsequently he traveled in South America, India, Tibet, Africa, Borneo, New guinea, and Southeast Asia, usually alone, often on foot. The isolated and the unknown paths were the ones he inevitably sought. In the course of his peripatetic life he has lived among Stone Age peoples, including head-hunters and cannibals, often in remote jungles where no white man had ever been. How does he survive? "By becoming the people I live with," he says. "I don't do it consciously. I'm fascinated by other people's mental habits and sex habits...I eat their food, sleep with them, wear their clothes, and go naked."

Robert J. Schoenberg (1933-2020), a former advertising executive, was the author of three books, including Geneen, a much-praised biography of ITT founder Harold Geneen, and Mr. Capone, the “fast-paced, fact-filled, behind-the-scenes” (Publishers Weekly) biography of one of America’s most notorious gangsters.

With sardonic wit and incisive social critiques, David Sedaris has become one of America’s pre-eminent humor writers. The great skill with which he slices through cultural euphemisms and political correctness proves that Sedaris is a master of satire and one of the most observant writers addressing the human condition today. David Sedaris is the author of Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk as well as collections of personal essays, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, Calypso, The Best of Me, and Happy-Go-Lucky. His diaries were published in two volumes Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 and A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020. His latest book is the children's book Pretty Ugly, which is illustrated by Ian Falconer. He lives in England, and is a contributor to the New Yorker, the BBC and CBS Sunday Morning.

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Susan Segal’s debut novel, Aria, was chosen by Barnes and Noble for its Nook First: Compelling Reads From Emerging Writers. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best Short Fictions Anthology and The Best of the Net, and has appeared in Redbook, The Atticus Review, The Evansville Review, The Citron Review, The Ilanot Review, Juked, and others. She has been awarded two Macdowell Colony fellowships. Susan received her MFA in fiction from the University of California at Irvine and is a Professor in the English Department at The University of Southern California, where she teaches fiction and creative non-fiction writing, editing, and literature. She lives in Orange County, California.

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