News from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5264
Telephone 609-258-3601; Fax 609-258-1301For immediate release: April 30, 2001
Contact: Marilyn Marks (609) 258-5748, mmarks@princeton.edu
Sophomore named first A. Scott Berg '71 scholar
Princeton, N.J. -- Princeton University sophomore Adena T. Spingarn has been named the first recipient of the new A. Scott Berg 71 Scholarship, an award created by the noted biographer to support independent research by an undergraduate English major.
Berg, a member of Princeton's class of 1971, whose best-selling biography of Charles Lindbergh won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, began his own practice of conducting extensive, primary-source research when he was an undergraduate at Princeton. He wrote his senior thesis, "Three to Get Ready," about Max Perkins, who edited the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. That prize-winning thesis became the basis of his first book, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, which won the National Book Award in 1978. That work was followed by Goldwyn: A Biography about the legendary Hollywood producer, and by his most recent book, Lindbergh.
Spingarn, a native of Tustin, California, won the Class of 1883 Freshman English Prize last year and plans to pursue a career in academics and writing. She will use the $3,500 stipend to pay for living, travel and research expenses as she researches a biography of poet, educator, and literary critic Joel Elias Spingarn, her distant cousin who served as president and chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for 30 years. "[Joel Spingarn] believed in an abstract, inner value of art and critics of art," Spingarn wrote in her application for the scholarship. "This rejection of context in art allowed [him] to truly look beyond the color of a man's skin. This...is what prompted W. E. B. DuBois to reflect that Spingarn was the only white person he ever knew who was not at all a racist."
Spingarn said that she was inspired by a talk Berg gave on campus earlier this year. "I was overjoyed to learn that funding is available for juniors&endash;and that the role model for my project himself has provided the award!"
Two other students also wrote outstanding applications and were awarded honorable- mention status. Junior Peter C. Robinson proposed a study of the American evangelical church as a culture-making arena, and junior Aili M. McConnon is interested in writing about the bachelor in fin-de-siecle European literature.
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