W. A. Swanberg is best known for his biographies of William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and Henry Luce, three titans of the newspaper and magazine publishing world. Swanberg's sole biography of a literary figure, Dreiser (1965), presents Theodore Dreiser's life in a way that is congruent with his other biographies and that raises significant questions about the practice of literary biography.

William Andrew Swanberg was born on 23 November 1907 in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Charles Henning and Valborg Larsen Swanberg. He received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1930 and took graduate courses there in 1931. After a series of miscellaneous jobs he became assistant editor at Dell Publishing Company in New York City in 1935. On 21 March 1936 he married Dorothy Upham Green; they have two children, John William and Sara Valborg. Promoted to editor in 1936, Swanberg stayed at Dell until 1944, when he went to Europe to work for the...