William Craig was an American novelist and historian who lived from 1929 until 1997. He was born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, and in 1958, he took a break from his job as an advertising salesperson to participate on the game show Tic-Tac-Dough. Craig enrolled at Columbia University and got both an undergraduate and a master's degree in history with his $42,000 in winnings--a record-breaking figure at the time. In 1967, he published his debut book, The Collapse of Japan. The book, a narrative history of World War II's closing weeks in the Pacific, hit the top 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and was praised by the New York Times Book Review as nearly perfect.

Craig traveled to three continents to interview hundreds of military and civilian survivors for Enemy at the Gates (1973), a documentary depiction of the Battle of Stalingrad. The book was a New York Times bestseller, and it was adapted into a film starring Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes. Craig published two outstanding espionage novels, The Tashkent Crisis (1971) and The Strasbourg Legacy (1975), in addition to his World War II histories.