About the Author
Daniel de Visé is a non-fiction author and journalist. His first book, I Forgot To Remember, with Su Meck, (S&S) began as a front-page article de Visé wrote for the Washington Post, part of a 23-year career spent at the Post, the Miami Herald and three other newspapers. De Visé has won more than two dozen national, regional and local journalism awards, including a shared 2001 Pulitzer Prize for deadline reporting. His investigative reporting twice led to the release of wrongly convicted men from life terms in Florida prisons.
Andy & Don:
The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (Simon & Schuster), his second book, began as a journalistic exploration into the storied career of his late brother-in-law, Don Knotts. De Visé is currently at work on a new book, The Comeback: Greg LeMond, 30 Shotgun Pellets and the World’s Greatest Bicycle Race (Grove/Atlantic). He lives with his wife and children in Garrett Park, Maryland, where he can sometimes be found managing his son’s youth baseball team or playing with the Stepping Stones, a Monkees cover band.
About Andy & Don
Andy Griffith and Don Knotts first met on Broadway in the 1950s. When Andy moved to Hollywood to film a TV pilot for a comedy about a small-town sheriff, Don called to ask if Andy’s sheriff could use a deputy. The friendship and comedy partnership between Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife ignited The Andy Griffith Show, elevating the folksy television sitcom into a timeless study of human friendship. Together, they created a program with a uniquely small-town dynamic that captured the hearts of Americans across the country who watched these two men rocking on the front porch, meditating about the pleasure of a bottle of pop. It is a story of unspoken rivalries, passionate affairs, unrequited loves, struggles with the temptations of fame, and friendships lost and regained. Although Andy and Don ended their Mayberry partnership in 1965, they remained best friends for the next half-century.
A lively and revealing biography of Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, this humorous, informative, and poignant book celebrates the powerful real-life friendship behind one of America’s most iconic television programs and shows how the magic was created.
—Library Journal
—Publishers WeeklyAndy and Don is a rewarding dual biography that is also a lively look inside the entertainment industry in the latter half of the twentieth century.
—News & Observer
Entertaining and provocative, it captures a golden moment in modern Americana. You’ll not only return again to Mayberry, you’ll feel as though you’ve never left.
—Tom Shales, Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic