James R. Messenger was a spokesman for AT&T and Lucent Technologies. He graduated with the class of 1966 from Warner Robins High School in Georgia. While attending graduate school at the University of Georgia in Athens in 1974, he sent a series of questions to a number of novelists asking how they felt about their books being made into films. The results were published in the Spring 1978 issue of “Literature/Film Quarterly” under the title, “I Think I Liked the Book Better: Nineteen Novelists Look at the film Version of Their Work.” Early in his twenty-year career in telecommunications, in 1982 he conceived of and taught “The Theory of the Information Age” at AT&T’s Executive Briefing Center in Bedminster, New Jersey and he became a recognized expert on the AT&T Worldwide Intelligent Network. He is the author of "The Death of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company–How 'Ma Bell' Died Giving Birth to the Information Age" and "If I Won the Nobel Prize." In the late 1970s, two documentary short films co-produced by Messenger received Academy Award nominations.