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There are hundreds of books about Woodrow Wilson, but I have an image of him in my mind that is unlike any picture I have seen anywhere else, based on material at Princeton and 35 years of researching and thinking about him.

I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.

There were a number of books about Bill Wilson, and by him, but a lot of the basic biographical tasks had not been done.

For years, I've had a hankering for the portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis. Franklin is credited with so many inventions: the postal system, lightning rods, the constitution. He was a rock star before there was such a thing.

For a long time, I'd been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer.

For me, one of the most interesting columns to write was about Dick Cheney when he represented the U.S. at a commemorative ceremony at Auschwitz.

I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn't. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.

In 1994, to motivate me to complete my pilot's license, my good friend, Gregg Maryniak, gave me Charles Lindbergh's autobiography of his solo flight across the Atlantic.

Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.

I obtained a Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Fellowship and entered the graduate program in History at the University of California. With no Greek or French and minimal Latin and German, I was in no position to pursue my classical interests, so I began work at Berkeley with little more than an open mind.