For me, life stories are more interesting than made up stories.

That's writer A Scott Berg. This episode is ostensibly about him, but it's also about Max Perkins and Samuel Goldwyn, Charles Lindbergh, Woodrow Wilson, and Catherine Hepburn, those are the people Scott Berg has written

groundbreaking biographies of during his five decades as a writer.

The point of biography, even more than learning about a single person's life,

is to illustrate the times in which that person lived. And to me that's as good as or better than any movie you can go to. It's the panorama of

life and that's quite wonderful and a good biography gives you that. You really are going to another place and you get

to inhabit somebody else's life. I think the best of the biographies are inspirational. I think there are great things you can pull out of it for your own life.

And you know

where we've been where we've been before you can know where you're going.

On this episode, The Chronicler and the Chronicled.

Scottberg talks about the people whose lives have consumed and the

chronicled.

and he pulls back the curtain to reveal the near monastic,

detail obsessed, and intensely fun process of writing someone else's life story.

This is what it takes, a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the Academy of Achievement.

I'm Alice Winkler.

Had a maid, this child is gifted and I heard that enough that I started to believe it.

If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity and you don't take it, you may never

have another child.

It all was so clear.

It was just like the picture started to form itself.

There was no way in which a lie could prevail over the truth.

...