The seemingly immortal George Plimpton, founding editor of the 50-year-old Paris Review, bestselling author, hobnobber with the great of the literary and every other world, and the very symbol of the man-about-Manhattan to several generations, is doing an autobiography for Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown. Pietsch bought world rights from agent Joe Regal as part of a two-book deal that will also include a collection of the author's best essays. These will undoubtedly include some of Plimpton's accounts, bestsellers 30 years ago, of what it was like to step into the ring with a heavyweight or play NFL football. Somehow, Plimpton always found himself in the thick of things—he was in the L.A. hotel kitchen where RFK was shot, for instance—but, also typically, he was elsewhere when the LB deal was struck, sailing in the Galápagos Islands, and it had to await his return for signing. Pat Strachan is the LB editor.