Laurence Bergreen is a prize-winning biographer and journalist. Bergreen's new book, Over The Edge of The World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe will be published in October. This will be the lead book for Harper Collins/Morrow. His most recent non-fiction book is Voyage to Mars: NASA’s Search for Life Beyond Earth, a narrative of NASA’s exploration of Mars and the search for extraterrestrial life, published in November 2000 by Penguin. Dramatic rights have been acquired by Gary Randall, who is developing it as a dramatic series. In 1997, Bantam Doubleday Dell published Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, a comprehensive biography drawing on unpublished manuscripts and exclusive interviews with Armstrong colleagues and friends. It appeared on many “Best Books of 1997” lists, including those of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Publishers Weekly, and has been published in Germany, Finland, and Great Britain. In 1994, Simon & Schuster published his Capone: The Man and the Era. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection, it has been published in numerous foreign languages and was optioned by Miramax. His groundbreaking biography, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, appeared in 1990. This book won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award and received front-page reviews in major American and British newspapers and appeared on bestseller lists. His previous biography, James Agee: A Life, was also critically acclaimed. His first book was Look Now, Pay Later: The Rise of Network Broadcasting.

Bergreen has written for many national publications including Esquire, Newsweek, TV Guide, Details, Prologue, and Military History Quarterly. He has taught at the New School for Social Research and served as Assistant to the President of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. In 1995, he served as a nonfiction judge for the National Book Awards and in 1991 as a judge for the PEN/Albrand Nonfiction Award. He also serves as a Featured Historian for the History Channel.