A. SCOTT BERG is the author of five best-selling biographies. Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978) received the National Book Award; in writing Goldwyn: A Biography (1989), Berg was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; and his 1998 biography Lindbergh won the Pulitzer Prize. For twenty years, Berg was a friend and confidant of Katharine Hepburn, and his biographical memoir Kate Remembered, published upon her death in 2003, became the number-one New York Times best seller for most of that summer. Wilson (2013), his biography of Woodrow Wilson, received several history prizes. In 2018, he edited the Library of America’s World War I and America: Told by the Americans Who Lived It. He is currently writing a biography of Thurgood Marshall.
TAYLOR BRANCH is an author and speaker known for his historical trilogy America in the King Years. The first book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63, won the Pulitzer Prize and other awards in 1989. Two successive volumes followed: Pillar of Fire (1998) and At Canaan’s Edge (2006). Branch’s 2009 memoir, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President, chronicles a secret project to gather a sitting president’s oral history. His 2011 cover story for the Atlantic, “The Shame of College Sports,” touched off continuing national debate. Branch’s latest book is The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (2013). He served as executive producer for the HBO documentary King in the Wilderness (2018). His career website is www.taylorbranch.com.
H. W. BRANDS was born in Oregon, went to college in California, sold cutlery across the American West, and earned graduate degrees in mathematics and history in Oregon and Texas. He taught at Vanderbilt University and Texas A&M University before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History. He writes on American history and politics, with books including Heirs of the Founders, The General vs. the President, The Man Who Saved the Union, Traitor to His Class, Andrew Jackson, The Age of Gold, The First American, and TR. Several of his books have been best sellers; two, Traitor to His Class and The First American, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
ROBERT A. CARO has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, twice won the National Book Award, three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and also won virtually every other major literary honor for his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, including the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.” In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal. Caro graduated from Princeton, was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday. He lives with his wife, the writer Ina Caro, in New York City, where he is at work on the fifth and final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
RON CHERNOW’s best-selling books include The House of Morgan, winner of the National Book Award; The Warburgs, which won the George S. Eccles Prize; The Death of the Banker; Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Washington: A Life, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; Alexander Hamilton, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and adapted into the award-winning Broadway musical Hamilton; and Grant, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times. Chernow has served as president of PEN America, has received eight honorary doctoral degrees, and was awarded the 2015 National Humanities Medal. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN’s interest in leadership began more than half a century ago when she was a professor at Harvard. Her experiences working for Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House and later assisting him on his memoirs led to her best-selling Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She followed up with the Pulitzer Prize–winning No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. She earned the Lincoln Prize for the runaway best seller Team of Rivals, the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award–winning film Lincoln, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit, the New York Times best-selling chronicle of the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. She lives in Concord, Massachusetts.
WALTER ISAACSON is a professor of history at Tulane University and an advisory partner at the financial services firm Perella Weinberg. He is the past CEO of the Aspen Institute, where he is now a Distinguished Fellow, and has been the chairman of CNN and the editor of Time magazine. Isaacson’s most recent biography is Leonardo da Vinci. He is also the author of The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography. A graduate of Harvard College and of Pembroke College of Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, and the American Philosophical Society.
DAVID McCULLOUGH has twice received the Pulitzer Prize, for Truman and John Adams, and twice received the National Book Award, for The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback. His other acclaimed books include The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, Brave Companions, 1776, The Greater Journey, and The Wright Brothers. His most recent book is The Pioneers (2019). He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.
JON MEACHAM is the author, most recently, of The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. He received the Pulitzer Prize for American Lion, his 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson, and is also the author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power; Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship; Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush; and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. Meacham, a distinguished visiting professor who holds the Rogers Chair for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University, is a contributing writer to the New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor to Time magazine. He lives with his wife and three children in Nashville and in Sewanee.
RICHARD REEVES is the author of the Presidential Trilogy—President Kennedy: Profile of Power, President Nixon: Alone in the White House, and President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination—and seventeen other books. A former chief political correspondent of the New York Times and chief correspondent of Frontline on PBS, he has made several award-winning documentary films. He is the senior lecturer of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
COKIE ROBERTS is a political commentator for ABC News and NPR. In her fifty years in broadcasting, she has won countless awards, including three Emmys, and has been inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame. In addition to her reporting, Roberts has written six New York Times best sellers, most dealing with the roles of women in U.S. history. Her books include the number-one best seller We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters, an account of American women’s roles and relationships over time; Founding Mothers; Ladies of Liberty; and Capital Dames, about women and Washington in the Civil War. Roberts and her husband, Steven V. Roberts, write a syndicated weekly newspaper column and have written two books together: Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families and From This Day Forward. In 2008, the Library of Congress named her a “Living Legend,” one of the few Americans to have attained that honor. She is the mother of two and grandmother of six.
JOHN G. ROBERTS JR., chief justice of the United States, was born in Buffalo, New York. He married Jane Marie Sullivan in 1996 and they have two children, Josephine and Jack. He received an AB from Harvard College in 1976 and a JD from Harvard Law School in 1979. He served as a law clerk for Judge Henry J. Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1979 to 1980 and as a law clerk for then associate justice William H. Rehnquist of the Supreme Court of the United States during the 1980 term. He was special assistant to the attorney general, U.S. Department of Justice (1981–82); associate counsel to President Ronald Reagan, White House Counsel’s Office (1982–86); and principal deputy solicitor general, U.S. Department of Justice (1989–93). From 1986 to 1989 and 1993 to 2003, he practiced law in Washington, D.C. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2003. President George W. Bush nominated him as chief justice of the United States, and he took his seat on September 29, 2005.
JEAN EDWARD SMITH was professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and Marshall University. He authored fourteen books, including Lucius D. Clay: An American Life; John Marshall: Definer of a Nation; Grant; FDR; Eisenhower in War and Peace; and Bush. His latest book, The Liberation of Paris, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2019, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation. Smith graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1954, served seven years in the U.S. Army field artillery, and earned a PhD from Columbia University in 1964. He lived in Huntington, West Virginia, with his wife, Christine, whom he married in Berlin in 1959. Jean passed away in 2019.
JACK D. WARREN JR. is the executive director of the Society of the Cincinnati, the nation’s oldest historical organization, founded in 1783 by George Washington and the officers of the Continental Army to perpetuate the memory of the American Revolution. He is also the founding director of the American Revolution Institute, created by the Society of the Cincinnati in 2012 to ensure public understanding and appreciation of the achievements of the Revolution. He is the author of The Presidency of George Washington (2000) as well as numerous essays on George Washington and other leaders of the American Revolution. He previously served as an editor of The Washington Papers, published by the University of Virginia Press. A native of Washington, D.C., he lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife, Janet.
JAY WINIK is one of the nation’s leading public historians. He is the author of the New York Times best sellers 1944, The Great Upheaval, and April 1865, which was a number-one best seller and is widely considered a classic. It was also turned into a TV special watched by more than fifty million people. Winik serves as the presidential historian for presidential inaugurations for Fox News, and was a historical advisor to the president of the National Geographic Networks. An elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians, he served on the governing council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was the inaugural historian-in-residence at the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a BA from Yale, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Yale.
BOB WOODWARD is an associate editor of the Washington Post, where he has worked since 1971. He has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, first in 1973 for the coverage of the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, and second in 2003 as the lead reporter for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He has authored or coauthored nineteen books, all of which have been national nonfiction best sellers. Thirteen have been number-one national best sellers. He has written books on nine presidents, from Nixon to Trump. Fear: Trump in the White House, which sold more than 1.1 million copies in its first week in the United States and broke the ninety-four-year-old first-week sales record of its publisher, Simon & Schuster, is the most detailed and penetrating portrait of a sitting president in the first years of an administration. More at www.bobwoodward.com.