Late in his life, the literary legend Max Perkins spoke to a group of New York City students about what A. Scott Berg describes in his National Book Award-winning 1978 biography Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius as "the electrifying challenges of his work -- the search for what he kept calling 'the real thing.'"

When Perkins, born on this day in 1884, was employed at the venerable house owned by Charles Scribner, he received a note from a young F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose groundbreaking novel This Side of Paradise he had published a few years earlier. Fitzgerald wrote of a young American living in France who "has a brilliant future. Ezra pound published a collection of his short pieces in Paris….I’d look him up right away. He’s the real thing."

That introduction evolved into Ernest Hemingway’s decades-long relationship with Perkins, to whom he dedicated The Old Man and the Sea.

Perkins’s fruitful and fraught relationships with the larger-than-life Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and other writers who shaped the course of twentieth-century American literature, are at the foundation of Berg’s book, which began as his undergraduate thesis at Princeton University.

Berg’s biography of the aviator Charles Lindbergh won the Pulitzer Prize, and he has just published Wilson, an account of the life of the twenty-eighth president of the United States (Leonardo DiCaprio will reportedly produce and star in an upcoming film based on the book).

He’s no stranger, in other words, to the painstaking rigors required to create a flowing narrative from an amalgamation of historic facts. He balances that archive-induced sweat with cool flashes of poetic insight into his characters -- his own version of "the real thing." Like his subject and hero Perkins, so much of his important work is invisible.