In the tradition of Truman, John Adams, and Team of Rivals, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning biographer of Charles Lindbergh, Maxwell Perkins, and Samuel Goldwyn sheds new light on a president and his presidency in a way that redefines our understanding of a tide-turning historical moment.
One hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg has completed Wilsonโthe most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the twenty-eighth President.
In addition to the hundreds of thousands of documents in the Wilson Archives, Berg was the first biographer to gain access to two recently discovered caches of papers belonging to those close to Wilson. From this material, Berg was able to add countless detailsโeven several unknown eventsโthat fill in missing pieces of Wilsonโs character and cast new light on his entire life.
From the scholar-President who ushered the country through its first great world war to the man of intense passion and turbulence, from the idealist determined to make the world โsafe for democracyโ to the stroke-crippled leader whose incapacity and the subterfuges around it were among the centuryโs greatest secrets, the result is an intimate portrait written with a particularly contemporary point of viewโa book at once magisterial and deeply emotional about the whole of Wilsonโs life, accomplishments, and failings. This is not just Wilson the iconโbut Wilson the man.