Geoffrey C. Ward

biographer, historian, documentary script writer

Geoffrey C. Ward was born in Newark, Ohio, in 1940 and grew up on the south side of Chicago and in New Delhi, India. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1962, with a bachelor's degree in studio art. Ward has collaborated with Ken Burns since 1984 and has been the sole or principal script writer for *Huey Long*; *Statue of Liberty*; *Thomas Hart Benton*; *The Civil War*; **Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio*; *Baseball*; The West*; *Thomas Jefferson*; *Frank Lloyd Wright*; *Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony*; *Jazz*; *Mark Twain*; *Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, and The War*. He was the principal or sole writer of *Nixon*; *Lindbergh*; *Reminiscing in Tempo*; *The Kennedy's*; *The Last Boss*; *TR*; and *Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided* - all part of PBS's American Experience series. For his work in documentary films, Ward has won five Emmy's and five Christopher Awards. Ward is also an independent historian and biographer, the author of six other books, among them *A First-Class Temperament: the Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt*, which won the National Book Critics Circle and *Los Angeles Times* Awards for Best Biography, the Francis Parkman Award of the Society of American Historians in 1989, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He writes frequently about India and Indian wildlife.