Joseph McBride was a volunteer in John F. Kennedy’s Wisconsin presidential primary campaign in 1960. McBride has been a journalist since 1960, writing for such publications as Life, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and, on this subject, The Nation. An internationally renowned film biographer and historian, he has written acclaimed biographies of John Ford, Frank Capra, and Steven Spielberg. McBride lives in Berkeley, California, and is a professor at San Francisco State University.