Andrew Kilpatrick

American financial author and Warren Buffett biographer, whose Of Permanent Value remains the most exhaustive chronicle of Buffett's life and investments.

Andrew Kilpatrick is an American financial journalist and author who has devoted much of his career to chronicling the life and investment philosophy of Warren Buffett. His book Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett is one of the most detailed and comprehensive accounts of Buffett’s career ever written, a sprawling, obsessively documented work that has been updated and expanded across multiple editions as Buffett’s story has continued to unfold.

Where Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball offers a more literary and psychologically probing biography, Kilpatrick’s Of Permanent Value functions more as a comprehensive reference: it traces Buffett’s investments deal by deal, quotes extensively from his letters and public statements, and documents the Berkshire Hathaway enterprise in granular detail. For serious students of Buffett’s methods who want to understand the specific rationale behind specific decisions over decades, Kilpatrick’s work is invaluable.

Kilpatrick spent years as a financial reporter for the Birmingham News and developed his Buffett expertise through sustained reporting rather than academic finance. His access to primary sources and his willingness to produce a work of reference rather than a popular narrative give Of Permanent Value a distinctive character. It sits alongside Schroeder’s biography, Robert Hagstrom’s The Warren Buffett Way, and Buffett’s own letters as essential reading for anyone seeking a complete understanding of the greatest investor of the modern era.