Scott Berg

A. Scott Berg found his calling early in life. At 15, he already knew he wanted to attend Princeton University. At Princeton he determined to tell the story of 20th century America by writing "five or six biographies" of American cultural figures. At 19 he began work on his senior thesis, a biography of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor who "discovered" and developed F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, James Jones and dozens of other important writers. After graduating cum laude in 1971, Berg spent seven years expanding the thesis, which became his first book, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. The first effort won the National Book Award and earned the young biographer a Guggenheim Fellowship, which helped support him while he completed his next book Goldwyn: A Biography, a life of the pioneer motion picture producer, published in 1989. Berg was looking for the subject of his next work when a publisher suggested the life of the controversial aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh had