A. Scott Berg | |
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![]() A. Scott Berg at the 2013 Texas Book Festival | |
Born | Andrew Scott Berg December 4, 1949 Norwalk, Connecticut, United States |
Occupation | Biographer, journalist |
Education | Palisades Charter High School |
Alma mater | Princeton University |
Period | 1978–present |
Notable works | Lindbergh (1998) Kate Remembered (2003) |
Notable awards | National Book Award 1980 Pulitzer Prize 1999 |
Partner | Kevin McCormick |
Andrew Scott Berg (born December 4, 1949) is an American biographer. After graduating from Princeton University in 1971, Berg expanded his senior thesis on editor Maxwell Perkins into a full-length biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978), which won a National Book Award. [1] [a] His second book Goldwyn: A Biography was published in 1989.
Berg's third book Lindbergh, a highly anticipated biography of aviator Charles Lindbergh was published in 1998, becoming a New York Times Best Seller, [2] and winning the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. In 2003 Berg published Kate Remembered , a biography-cum-memoir about his friendship with actress Katharine Hepburn that received mixed reviews. His biography of Woodrow Wilson was published in 2013.
Berg also wrote the story for Making Love (1982), a controversial film that was the first major studio drama to address the subjects of gay love, closeted marriages, and coming out. He has contributed articles to magazines such as Architectural Digest and Vanity Fair.
Berg was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, the son of Barbara (Freedman) Berg and film producer Dick Berg. He was raised Jewish. [3] When Berg was eight, his family relocated to Los Angeles, California. [3] While a sophomore at Palisades High School, Berg researched the author F. Scott Fitzgerald (a favorite of Barbara's, who named her son in part after Fitzgerald) for a report and "developed a mania" for his writing. [4] Berg read all of Fitzgerald's works and later recalled: "It was the first time I saw the fusion of an artist and his life, a tragic and romantic life." [5]
He applied to Princeton University, primarily because it was Fitzgerald's alma mater , [6] and was accepted in 1967. At Princeton, Berg performed in the Princeton Triangle Club theater troupe and considered dropping out to become an actor, though he was convinced by English professor Carlos Baker, a well-regarded biographer of Ernest Hemingway, to "graduate, so at least you'll be an actor with a college degree". [4] Berg studied under Baker, who offered him "constant encouragement and counsel" on his senior thesis, which was a study of editor Maxwell Perkins's career between 1919 and 1929. [7] [8] Berg graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton in 1971 after completing his 262-page-long senior thesis titled "Three to Get Ready." [9]
After graduating from Princeton in 1971, Berg decided to expand the thesis into a full-length biography, thinking it would take around nine months. [10] He also formulated a career plan at this time, and later recalled: "I did tell myself early on: I think it would be interesting, perhaps, to spend a career writing a half-dozen biographies of twentieth-century American cultural figures—each one, as I often use as my metaphor, a different wedge of the great apple pie." [11] The Perkins biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, took longer than Berg anticipated and was eventually published in 1978, winning a National Book Award in Biography. [1] [a] In 2016, The New Yorker credited Berg with "almost single-handedly rescu[ing] Maxwell Perkins from the anonymity he desired." [12]
"When I was about 22, I had an idea that I was going to write a series of biographies of 20th Century American cultural figures and each one was gonna be from a different part of the country and each one was gonna be from a different slice of the apple pie." [13]
In 1978, Berg was approached by Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. to write a biography of his father, the independent film producer Samuel Goldwyn. Berg initially turned the project down, telling Goldwyn that "he was interested in American culture, not Hollywood," but changed his mind after visiting Goldwyn's archives and discovering gin rummy I.O.U.s, menus from Goldwyn's dinner parties, and "all the quotidian minutiae that are a biographer's dream". [14] He won a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, which helped finance his work on the biography. [15] The same year, Berg wrote the story for Making Love , a controversial film that was the first major studio drama to address the subjects of homosexual love, closeted marriages, and coming out. [16] [17] He also narrated Directed by William Wyler, a 1986 documentary about the filmmaker William Wyler for which Berg interviewed Wyler, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, and Barbra Streisand, among others. [18] In 1989, Berg published Goldwyn: A Biography, his second biography.
After completing Goldwyn in 1989, Berg began the search for his next subject, who he wanted to be "another great American cultural figure but — because I had written about Perkins and Goldwyn — not somebody from the worlds of publishing or film". [19] After briefly considering Tennessee Williams, Berg decided to research the aviator Charles Lindbergh, attracted by what he described as "the dramatic possibilities of the story of the great hero who became a great victim and a great villain". [19] Berg convinced Lindbergh's widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to grant him unprecedented access to the man's archives, which he was surprised to find totaled "1,300 boxes, or several million papers". [20]
The biography, Lindbergh , was highly anticipated; prior to its publication, the book's film rights were bought, sight unseen, by Steven Spielberg, who planned to direct a movie of it. [21] Published in 1998, Lindbergh sold about 250,000 copies in hardcover, [22] and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Berg was noted for his exhaustive research, [21] as well as his sympathetic, but by no means uncritical, approach to Lindbergh, whose alleged anti-Semitism he addressed in a straightforward, unblinking manner.[ citation needed ] Five years after Berg's book was published, it was revealed that Lindbergh had lived a double life, with three mistresses and secret children in Germany. [23] Berg was stumped, reported The New York Times: "'It is just not like him, at least as he appeared to me,' Mr. Berg said. 'But maybe he had entered a new phase of his life. I've long been of a mind that anything is possible with Charles Lindbergh.'" [24]
From 1998 to 2000, Berg wrote Kate Remembered , a biography-cum-memoir detailing his 20-year friendship with the Hollywood actress Katharine Hepburn. [25] The book was published on July 11, 2003, only 12 days after Hepburn's death. It spent 11 weeks on the New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller list, [26] but received uneasy critical response. In The New York Times , Robert Gottlieb called it an "odd and unsettling book [that leaves] a sense of exploitation", and gossip columnist Liz Smith, a friend of Hepburn's, called Berg "vain and narcissistic", and declared the book "[s]elf-promoting fakery....Hepburn would have despised it and his betrayal of her friendship." [27] [28] Berg responded in a written statement, saying that he was "truly shocked at Liz Smith's professional behaviour — or, more accurately, her lack thereof" in "her personal assault on my reputation, one that stops just short of character assassination". [28]
In 1999, Berg received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. [29] [30]
Berg served on Princeton University's board of trustees from 1999 to 2003. In 2000, he began researching a biography of Woodrow Wilson, of whom Berg says, "I have an image of him in my mind that is unlike any picture I have seen anywhere else, based on material at Princeton and 35 years of researching and thinking about him". [31] Wilson was published on September 10, 2013.
In the 2010s, Berg began working increasingly in film and television. He worked for Warner Bros. on an unrealized film adaptation of his favorite childhood television series, 77 Sunset Strip , and served as an executive producer of Genius , the 2016 film adaptation of his Maxwell Perkins biography. [32] Berg was also a consulting producer on the 2017 Amazon series The Last Tycoon . [33]
In 2017, Berg announced that he was researching a biography of Thurgood Marshall, explaining that a definitive biography had not been written and that the project would allow him to explore the subject of race, "the most important topic this country must grapple with in the next few decades". [34]
Berg lives with his partner Kevin McCormick, a film producer, in Los Angeles. [35] [36] His brothers are Jeff Berg, former CEO of International Creative Management, a leading Hollywood talent and literary agency; and music producer and musician Tony Berg. His youngest brother Rick is a partner and manager at the production company Code Entertainment. His niece is Z Berg, a musician of The Like and JJAMZ.
Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress whose career as a Hollywood leading lady spanned six decades. She was known for her headstrong independence, spirited personality, and outspokenness, cultivating a screen persona that matched this public image, and regularly playing strong-willed, sophisticated women. She worked in a varied range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, which earned her various accolades, including four Academy Awards for Best Actress—a record for any performer.
William Wyler was a German-born American film director and producer. Known for his work in numerous genres over five decades, he received numerous awards and accolades, including three Academy Awards. He holds the record of twelve nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director. For his oeuvre of work, Wyler was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, the Directors Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award, and the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award.
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire with an obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Because of their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage. After Zelda traveled abroad to Europe, her mental health deteriorated, and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies, which required psychiatric care. Her doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia, although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.
William Maxwell Evarts "Max" Perkins was an American book editor, best remembered for discovering authors Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe.
Save Me the Waltz is a 1932 novel by American writer Zelda Fitzgerald. It is a semi-autobiographical account of her life in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era and her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel recounts the lives of Jazz Age hedonists Alabama Beggs and her husband David Knight, thinly-disguised alter-egos of their real-life counterparts. An aging Alabama aspires to become a prima ballerina, but an infected blister from her pointe shoe leads to blood poisoning, forever ending her dreams of fame.
Samuel Goldwyn, also known as Samuel Goldfish, was a Polish-born American film producer and pioneer in the American film industry, who produced Hollywood's first major motion picture. He was best known for being the founding contributor and executive of several motion picture studios in Hollywood. He was awarded the 1973 Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award (1947) and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (1958).
This Side of Paradise is the debut novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in March 1920. It examines the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the dawn of the Jazz Age. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive middle-class student at Princeton University who dabbles in literature and engages in a series of unfulfilling romances with flappers. The novel explores themes of love warped by greed and social ambition. Fitzgerald, who took inspiration for the title from a line in Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti, spent years revising the novel before Scribner's accepted it for publication.
Come and Get It is a 1936 American lumberjack drama film directed by Howard Hawks and William Wyler. The screenplay by Jane Murfin and Jules Furthman is based on the 1935 novel of the same title by Edna Ferber.
Carlos Baker was an American writer, biographer and former Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. Baker was born in 1909 in Biddeford, Maine. He received his A.B. from Dartmouth College and his M.A. from Harvard University. He then received his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University in 1940 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The influence of Spenser on Shelley's major poetry." Baker's published works included several novels and books of poetry and various literary criticisms and essays.
Irene Gladys Selznick was an American socialite and theatrical producer.
The Beautiful and Damned is a 1922 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in New York City, the novel's plot follows a young artist Anthony Patch and his flapper wife Gloria Gilbert who become "wrecked on the shoals of dissipation" while excessively partying at the dawn of the hedonistic Jazz Age. As Fitzgerald's second novel, the work focuses upon the swinish behavior and glittering excesses of the American social elite in the heyday of New York's café society.
Wuthering Heights is a 1939 American romantic period drama film directed by William Wyler, produced by Samuel Goldwyn, starring Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier and David Niven, and based on the 1847 novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The film depicts only 16 of the novel's 34 chapters, eliminating the second generation of characters. The novel was adapted for the screen by Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht and John Huston (uncredited). The supporting cast features Flora Robson and Geraldine Fitzgerald.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Kate Remembered is a book released on July 11, 2003 by A. Scott Berg, which tells the story, life, and his experiences with actress Katharine Hepburn. The book was released 12 days after Hepburn's death at 96 on June 29. The book received mixed reviews.
Lindbergh is a 1998 biography of Charles Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg. The book became a New York Times Best Seller and received the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography.
Wilson is a 2013 biography of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg. The book is a New York Times Best Seller.
Genius is a 2016 biographical drama film directed by Michael Grandage and written by John Logan, based on the 1978 National Book Award-winner Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg. The film stars Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, Dominic West, and Guy Pearce. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival.
The Samuel Goldwyn Estate is a house at 1200 Laurel Lane in Beverly Hills, California. It was designed by American architects Douglas Honnold and George Vernon Russell for Polish-American film producer Samuel Goldwyn and American actress Frances Howard, finishing construction in 1934. The property was owned by the Goldwyn family until 2015, when it was purchased and subsequently renovated by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift.
Andrew Winchester Turnbull was an American biographer, scholar, and essayist who wrote acclaimed biographies of novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Turnbull grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and first met Fitzgerald when the author lived on his family's property in the 1930s. After graduating Princeton University and serving in the United States Navy during World War II, Turnbull obtained his doctorate from Harvard University. He taught literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University. He committed suicide at age 48.
A. Scott Berg presents the Golden Plate Award to Gore Vidal during the 2006 International Achievement Summit.