A. SCOTT BERG graduated in 1971 from Princeton University, where he received the English department’s thesis prize for his work on the legendary book editor Maxwell Perkins. He spent the next seven years expanding his thesis into MAX PERKINS: EDITOR OF GENIUS, which became a national bestseller and won the National Book Award. The book also drew the attention of Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., who offered Berg complete access to his father’s archives. With the assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Berg spent the next nine years writing GOLDWYN: A BIOGRAPHY. It became an international bestseller; and Billy Wilder called it “the best book about Hollywood” he had ever read. In 1990, Anne Morrow Lindbergh granted Berg exclusive and unrestricted access to both her archives and those of her late husband, Charles Lindbergh. Eight years later, he published LINDBERGH, which also became an international bestseller and which received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
For twenty years, Berg had been a friend and confidant of Katharine Hepburn; and upon her death in 2003, he published a biographical memoir, KATE REMEMBERED, which became the #1 NEW YORK TIMES bestseller for most of that summer. After thirteen years of work, his biography of Woodrow Wilson was published in September, 2013 and became an immediate bestseller.
Berg has written and co-produced two documentary films—“Directed by William Wyler” and “Goldwyn: The Man and His Movies.” He serves on the board of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and as a Charter Trustee of Princeton University. He is currently writing a biography of Thurgood Marshall; and he edited the Library of America’s newest volume, WORLD WAR I AND AMERICA: TOLD BY THE AMERICANS WHO LIVED IT.
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