Craig Claiborne, born in Sunflower, Mississippi, in 1920, moved with his family to Indianola in 1924, where his mother Kathleen ran a boarding house. After studying hotel and restaurant management in Switzerland, he became the first male food editor for the New York Times in 1957. He wrote or edited more than twenty cookbooks, including the New York Times Cookbook, and his cultural reporting and use of the restaurant star rating system transformed American food journalism.