Interesting AND illuminating writing

“I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.”– A. Scott Berg

Born on this date in 1949, American biographer Scott Berg is one of our premier biographers and has done a remarkable job in “illuminating” the lives of other famous Americans – among them Samuel Goldwyn, the founder of MGM; aviator Charles Lindbergh; and actress Katherine Hepburn.
The son of longtime film producer Dick Berg, Scott grew up in Connecticut, graduated from Princeton, and then got into writing biographies by expanding upon a senior thesis he chose to do on longtime editor Maxwell Perkins, the editor who handled both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway for the New York-based publisher Scribner’s.   Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, his first full-length effort, not only is an illuminating look at the great editor but also the winner of a National Book Award.   His second book was Goldwyn: A Biography, and his third Lindbergh, the acclaimed New York Times bestseller about the Lone Eagle.  It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.   A close friend of Hepburn, his 2003 book Kate Remembered, is a biography-cum-memoir about the friendship, and while it has received mixed reviews, I highly recommend it if you are like me and enjoyed Hepburn’s long (and terrific) acting career.Berg set a goal at age 22 of writing “a series of biographies                    
 about the great 20th Century American cultural figures from different parts of the country.”   So far, he’s done 5 – about one every 8-10 years.   “I am a compulsive worker,” he said.   “But I'm also a compulsive relaxer.”

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