Burton J. Hendrick
Burton Jesse Hendrick (1871-1949) was a biographer, historian, and journalist who won three Pulitzer Prizes. He was the author of several books including The Jews in America.
Early life
He was born in New Haven, Connecticut. While attending Yale University, Hendrick was editor of both The Yale Courant and The Yale Literary Magazine. He received his BA in 1895 and his master's in 1897 from Yale.
Journalist career
After completing his degree work, Hendrick became editor of the New Haven Morning News. In 1905, after writing for The New York Evening Post and The New York Sun, Hendrick left newspapers and became a "muckraker" writing for McClure's Magazine. His "The Story of Life-Insurance" expose appeared in McClure's in 1906. The next year the magazine published his article "The Great Jewish Invasion". The article was updated in 1913 as "The Jewish Invasion of America".
Following his career at McClure's, Hendrick went to work in 1913 at Walter Hines Page's World's Work magazine as an associate editor. In 1919, Hendrick began writing biographies, when he was the ghostwriter of Ambassador Morgenthau's Story for Henry Morgenthau, Sr..
He won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for The Victory at Sea which he co-authored with William Sowden Sims, the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page and again in 1929 for The Training of An American. Hendrick wrote the Age of Big Business in 1919, using a series of individual biographies, as an enthusiastic look at the foundation of the corporation in America and the rapid rise of the United States as a world power. After completing the commissioned biography of Andrew Carnegie, Mr. Hendrick turned to writing "group biographies". There is an obvious gap in the later works published by Mr. Hendrick between 1940 and 1946 which is explained by his work on a biography on Andrew Mellon, which was commissioned by the Mellon family, but never published.
At the time of his death, Burton J. Hendrick was working on a biography of Louise Whitfield Carnegie, the wife of Andrew Carnegie.
Books
- 1919 Ambassador Morgenthau's Story
- 1921 Age of Big Business
- 1923 Life and Letters of Walter H Page
- 1923 The Jews in America
- 1924 Biography of William Crawford Gorgas
- 1928 The Training Of An American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter H Page
- 1932 The Life of Andrew Carnegie
- 1935 The Lees of Virginia: Biography of a Family
- 1937 Bulwark of the Republic, A Biography of the Constitution
- 1939 Statesmen of the Lost Cause: Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet
- 1946 Lincoln's War Cabinet
References
'To Cast Them in the Heroic Mold' Court Biographers - The Case of Burton Jesse Hendrick by Dr. Robert J. Rusnak, Rosary College, River Forest, IL copyright 1996.
- 'Burton Hendrick obituary', New York Times, March 25, 1949.
See also
External links
The articles "The Great Jewish Invasion" (1907) and "The Jewish Invasion of America" (1913) which appeared in McClure's Magazine can be found by search of Google Books.
