Josef Berger, or Joseph Isadore Berger (May 12, 1903 – November 11, 1971), was an American journalist, author and speechwriter.

Early life

Berger was born in Denver, Colorado in 1903 and graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1924. He worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star for a time.

Career

In 1924, Berger moved to New York, where he worked as a reporter and editor for ten years. In 1928, he began writing juvenile books, making his debut with Captain Bib, which was published in 1929. He published a total of twenty books, in addition to writing short stories and articles for publications such as Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, Reader's Digest, McCall's, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

In 1934, he settled with his wife and daughter in Provincetown, Massachusetts where he tried to make it as a freelance writer. Berger had a hard time earning money and for about year lived in poverty until he found a job with the government-sponsored Federal Writers' Project. His 1937 Cape Cod Pilot became a success and enabled him to obtain a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship the next year, which he used to write In Great Waters, a history of the Portuguese in New England. He received another Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946.

Berger, who wrote under the pen name Jeremiah Digges, went to Washington, D.C., in 1940 to become the editor of reports for the U.S. House of Representative Select Committee to Investigate Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens. In 1941 he worked in the same capacity for the U.S. Senate Committee on Wartime Health and Education.

Death

At the age of 67, he died suddenly of an aneurysm on November 11, 1971 in New York City.

References

  • FBI Venona Files
  • Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, The Spy Who Seduced America: Lies and Betrayal in the Heat of the Cold War: The Judith Coplon Story, (Invisible Cities Press LLC, 2002)
  • Guide to the Josef Berger papers at the University of Oregon