Burton J. Hendrick

{{Short description|American author and editor (1870–1949)}}

{{More citations needed|date=October 2015}}

Burton Jesse Hendrick (December 8, 1870 – March 23, 1949), 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.{{cite book|author1=Elizabeth A. Brennan|author2=Elizabeth C. Clarage|title=Who's who of Pulitzer Prize Winners|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=63nvmt4HqTEC&pg=PA12|year=1999|publisher=Greenwood Publishing Group|isbn=978-1-57356-111-2|pages=12–}} In 1905, after writing for The New York Evening Post and The New York Sun, Hendrick left newspapers and became a "muckraker" writing for McClure's Magazine. His "The Story of Life-Insurance" exposé 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.

In 1921 he won the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Victory at Sea, which he co-authored with William Sowden Sims, the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, and the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for The Training of an American.

In 1919 Hendrick published the Age of Big Business by using a series of individual biographies to create 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,{{cite book|author=Edd Applegate|title=Muckrakers: A Biographical Dictionary of Writers and Editors|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2TnFAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA75|date=18 April 2008|publisher=Scarecrow Press|isbn=978-1-4616-6975-3|pages=75–}} Hendrick turned to writing group biographies. There is an obvious gap in the later works published by 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.

At the time of his death, Hendrick was working on a biography of Louise Whitfield Carnegie, the wife of Andrew Carnegie.