Brooklyn Heights resident Ron Chernow, who won a 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his biography Washington: A Life, as well as a place in the Brooklyn Heights Blog’s Top 10 that year, has received the BIO award from the non-profit Biographers International Organization.

During a gathering May 18 at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, Chernow, 64, spoke about some of his most famous subjects and how their public reputations often concealed a far more interesting private person: “Once upon a time, biography was a very formal, straight-laced affair. But nowadays we all expect the enterprising biographer to ferret out that hidden self.”

The BIO award is given for making a “major contribution” to the field of biography. Previous winners include Robert Caro and Arnold Rampersad.

Chernow’s other works include bios of Alexander Hamilton, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/59122

New York Times: No American is so revered as George Washington, yet Mr. Chernow, 62, was troubled that “in recent years people had an image of Washington as wooden, bland and boring,” far from the “passionate, complex and sensitive man — dynamic and commanding and charismatic,” whose contemporaries viewed him as an authentic hero, the author said Monday.

Have you read Washington: A Life? Discuss it here!

[via Brooklyn Heights Blog]