Steve Lopez - Author of The Soloist

Steve Lopez, a distinguished journalist, currently writes a column - "Points West" - for the LA Times. His series about a "violin man," named Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, became so popular that he expanded his columns into a book entitled The Soloist - A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music.

The book, in turn, is the source for a film, The Soloist, in which Robert Downey, Jr. plays Steve Lopez and Jamie Foxx plays Nathaniel Ayers.