Howard A. Rodman is a screenwriter, novelist, and essayist whose work often explores the interplay of politics, history, and art. A past president of the Writers Guild of America West and an award-winning professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Rodman has written films for directors such as Steven Soderbergh and Volker Schlöndorff. His fiction has been praised for its formal daring, rich imagination, and deep engagement with history. Destiny Express is his acclaimed debut novel, first published by Atheneum in 1990 and celebrated for its visionary blending of fact and invention. His novel The Great Eastern has been described as "a sprawling, lavish anticolonial adventure novel, set in the 1850s–1870s in New York, London, Paris, India, and the North Atlantic."