max perkins was the great book editor at scribners and nurtured f. scott fitzgerald and 25 other important writers in the united states around the two world wars. >> "goldland" was a biography. >> it was about the film mogul who began life as a teenage runaway from warsaw and came to america believing in the american dream and within a few years had moved to a place called hollywood and manufacturing the american dream. >> 1998 was the lindbergh book. why lindbergh? >> it was something i thought about when i was writing max perkins. that was i thought it would be interesting to write a shelf full of biographies of 20th century american cultural figures. i felt as long as i could go, i would like to write about people each one would be from a different part of the country and each would be from a different sliver of the apple pie. so max perkins was a harvard educated white anglo-saxon protestant in publishing. samuel poe lan, a polish illiterate who went into films. charles lindbergh, the heartland. what are the great metaphors of 20th century americ

i adjust the year before published one of max perkins authors and so scott and i struck up a friendship that is persistent, although i must say a great physical distance ever since. you know scott is the author of maxwell perkins, is the author of lindbergh, as the author of a wonderful memoir of katharine hepburn. and now this fine biography of woodrow wilson of which are listed only scott almost alone among presidential biographers understand the president as a human being as well as a policymaker in this place great emphasis on the personal and private life with him in his personal private life is extremely interesting and important. scott. [applause] >> thank you. thank you very much for being at this afternoon. thank you, jonathan. a wonderful introduction that means all the more to me coming from the man i consider the greatest literary critic in this country. so you are lucky people living in this city i would say. [applause] so, enough about him. [laughter] let's talk about me and woodrow wilson. i'm up to you this much on a personal level about me. i have been interested in woo