Laurence Bergreen (born Feb 4, 1950) is a historian and biographer living in New York City. His books have been published in more than twenty languages worldwide. Bergreen's biographies have received numerous awards and he has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek and Esquire. He taught at The New School in New York, and served as Assistant to the President of The Paley Center for Media. Bergreen frequently lectures at major universities and symposiums, and is a Featured Historian for The History Channel.
In 2007, Bergreen was asked by NASA to name some geological features surrounding the Victoria crater on Mars, based on places Ferdinand Magellan visited and inspired by Bergreen's narrative history, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, (HarperCollins, 2003). In 2008, Bergreen was a keynote speaker at NASA's 50th anniversary event in Washington, D.C.. He is currently at work on an account of the four voyages of Christopher Columbus. In September 2010, Bergreen will be a guest lecturer for the opening of the map exhibition, "Strait Through: Magellan to Cook and the Pacific" at Princeton University.
A Harvard graduate, Bergreen worked in journalism, academia and broadcasting before publishing his first biography, James Agee: A Life, which was a New York Times "Notable Book" for 1984. His 1990 biography, Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award and was also a New York Times "Notable Book".
In 1994, Simon & Schuster published Bergreen's Capone: The Man and the Era. The book was translated into German, Japanese and Czech and was optioned by Miramax. Bantam Doubleday Dell published Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life in 1997, which appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Publishers Weekly lists of "Best Books of 1997".
In 2000 Bergreen published Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth, a narrative of NASA's exploration of Mars. His next work, the bestselling Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, (HarperCollins, 2003) became a New York Times "Notable Book" and is in its 20th printing. The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Prodigious research, sure-footed prose and vivid depictions make for a thoroughly satisfying account ... wondrous detail, a first-rate historical page turner.” The book has sold over 140,000 copies and is available in over 12 countries. Bergreen's latest biography, Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, (Knopf, 2007) is currently being developed into a feature film starring Matt Damon. Simon Winchester, author of The Map That Changed the World, noted, “At last! Marco Polo comes to life! Laurence Bergreen, perhaps America's liveliest biographer, has created a triumph of fascinations, a classic portrait that now surely can never be bettered.”