Mark Seal is an American journalist and author. Seal worked as a journalist in Texas before becoming a freelance magazine writer in 1984, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 2003, and has written and co-written about 15 books.^[1] Seal's magazine writings have appeared in Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Condé Nast Traveler, Golf Digest, Texas Monthly, InStyle, Town & Country, Time, and The New York Times.^[1] Prior to 1984 when Seal became a freelance magazine writer, he worked as a reporter at several Texas newspapers, including the Houston Chronicle and The Dallas Morning News.^[1]

Seal has collaborated on more than 15 non-fiction books, including Alex Spanos's Sharing the Wealth, Bo Derek's Riding Lessons, and Jerry Speziale's Without a Badge: Undercover in the World's Deadliest Criminal Organization.^[1] He has written a number of books including Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa (2009), a biography of the adventurous life of African wildlife photographer Joan Root.^[1] His 2011 book, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, is about Christian Gerhartsreiter, the serial imposter who posed as a member of the Rockefeller family in what has been described as one of the longest scams in history.^[2] The book is in preliminary development to be made into a movie by Fox Searchlight, directed by Walter Salles and produced by Donald De Line.^[3]