About the Author

Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. The Institute seeks to better society by stimulating effective management and responsible leadership. It does this, in large part, by advancing the ideas and ideals of the late Peter F. Drucker.

Rick is also a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek online. And he was the editor of The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy, which was published in June 2010 by McGraw-Hill.

Rick’s book, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, was published in September 2008 by PublicAffairs. It was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of its 25 favorite nonfiction books of the year and chosen as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history and a PEN USA Literary Award.

Rick is the coauthor, with Mark Arax, of the bestseller The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, which was selected as one of the 10 best books of 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the 10 best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. It won, among other honors, a California Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

Before joining the Drucker Institute, Rick spent two decades as a newspaper reporter, editor, and columnist at the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times.