Ed Zwick's Reading List

"David Cornwell's private life turns out to be as engrossing as his spy fiction."

"Today, I'm lost in Jonathan Rosen's "The Best Minds" — a moving account of a brilliant young man's schizophrenia and his childhood friendship with the author that's also a lament for the struggle toward mental health reform."

"William Goldman's "Adventures in the Screen Trade" is the accepted gold standard."

"Christopher Isherwood's "Prater Violet" — a romantic yet stinging mix of the personal and the professional — is a longtime favorite."

"Moss Hart's "Act One," although about a life in the theater, epitomizes every young artist's journey from innocence to experience."

"Maurice Zolotow's biography, "Billy Wilder in Hollywood," despises the man while admiring the artist."

"Otto Friedrich's "City of Nets," about German and Austrian émigrés lost and disoriented in 1940s L.A."

"Sam Wasson's "The Big Goodbye" rivals Lillian Ross's "Picture" in its detailed account of the making of a single movie."

"Sam Wasson's "The Big Goodbye" rivals Lillian Ross's "Picture" in its detailed account of the making of a single movie."

"David Niven's "The Moon's a Balloon" remains an innocent celebration of the sheer joy and privilege of moviemaking."

"With a gimlet eye for observed behavior, painstaking period detail and a generous embrace of a family's love and failings, Katz follows a long marriage and the odysseys of its four offspring, becoming by the end nothing less than a novelistic social history of America from the '40s through the '80s."

"Geoffrey Wolff's "The Duke of Deception," a bittersweet memoir about his ne'er-do-well con artist father. I'm usually crying by Page 2."

"Barry Unsworth's "Sacred Hunger" stands as an epic tragedy about an unthinkable historical moment that's magnificently compassionate in the telling."