Burton J. Hendrick

Who was Burton J. Hendrick?

Burton Jesse Hendrick, born in New Haven, Connecticut, was an American author. 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. 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, BJH left newspapers and became a "muckraker" writing for McClure's Magazine. His "The Story of Life-Insurance" expose appeared in McClure's in 1906. 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.