A novelist and playwright, Valentin Kataev has a happy gift for writing about childhood and adolescence. His early novels, THE EMBEZZLERS, TIME, FORWARD!, and THE LONE WHITE SAIL, have been published in American editions, and his comedy of student life in Moscow, SQUARING THE CIRCLE, has been produced on the American stage and television. He is the editor and founder of YOUTH magazine, with a circulation of more than four hundred thousand readers.