Woodward/White is a New York corporation, founded in 1981 by Steven Woodward Naifeh and Gregory White Smith as a legal expression of a partnership that began in 1974 when the two met on their first day at Harvard Law School.

In 1982 Woodward/White began publishing The Best Lawyers in America, a guide to the top legal talent in the U.S., which is now in its tenth edition and widely recognized as the preeminent directory of its kind.

In 1989, after Smith successfully overcame a diagnosis of “terminal” brain cancer, Woodward/White began publishing The Best Doctors in America, which was featured on the CBS newsmagazine, “60 Minutes” in 1998. Today, Best Doctors is a global medical information service that helps people around the world find outstanding medical care.

Also in 1989, Naifeh and Smith decided that because of Smith’s illness it was “too late to defer dreams” so they bought a dilapidated 60-room former Whitney-Vanderbilt mansion in Aiken, South Carolina, called – appropriately – Joye Cottage.

In the 28 years since they met, Naifeh and Smith have written 18 books together, including four New York Times bestsellers. Their Jackson Pollock: An American Saga won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for biography and was a National Book Award finalist. In 2001, it was made into the Academy Award-winning motion picture, “Pollock”.

Naifeh and Smith have been the subjects of profiles not only on “60 Minutes” but also in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, The International Herald Tribune, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Harvard Magazine.