John Berendt

JOHN BERENDT

Date of Birth: December 5, 1939
Birthplace: Syracuse, New York
Current Residence: New York, New York
Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1961
Profession: Associate editor, Esquire, 1961-69; Holiday, senior staff editor, 1969; associate producer, David Frost Show, 1969-71; associate producer, Dick Cavett Show, 1973-75; editor, New York, 1977-79 (all jobs New York City); observed life in Savannah, Georgia, during the 1980s; columnist, Esquire.
Influences, Interests and Interesting Tidbits: "When [Cathie Matthews, a real-estate broker from Little Rock, Arkansas] bought the 400,000th copy of the book in December, inside she found a hand-written note from Berendt, telling her to call Random House [his publisher] for a free trip to Savannah...Berendt, who guided her around town...worried that Matthews was not sufficiently exposed to the city's weird side. 'She saw the beauty of Savannah,' he says, 'but I'm not sure she got the bizarreness of it.' For that, of course, she can simply reread the book."
—Ginia Bellafante and Adam Cohen, Time, April 3, 1995

On fabricating some of the scenes in his book "My argument is that most nonfiction books are reconstruction...[If I] set out today to write about Franklin D. Roosevelt, [I] would probably have a tough time with the kind of intimate conversation that tend to go unrecorded....I'm sorry, I reconstruct."
—John Berendt, Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1994

When I was writing [Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil] people asked me if I thought it would be a best seller and I said, 'Are you kidding?' I thought it would be a cult favorite and a critical success. I didn't think about a big audience.
-John Berendt, Time, April 3, 1995

In the South, they love to act out. They are shameless, just shameless. They dote on their eccentricity. And tradition and the past are with them all the time.
-John Berendt, Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1994

In recounting the tale of William's trials [for murder], [Berendt] frequently veers off and includes overheard conversations, funny vignettes and bits of historical and architectural data—a method that a lesser observer might have botched but that works wonderfully here.
-Glenna Whitley, New York Times Book Review, March 20, 1994