Nicole Gaudiano

USA TODAY

Bernie Sanders didn’t make journalist Harry Jaffe’s job easy as he reported “Why Bernie Sanders Matters,” a new unauthorized biography.

Jaffe, Washingtonian magazine’s editor at large, felt a different kind of “Bern” when he approached the notoriously blunt Sanders on the street in downtown D.C. after months of attempts to land an interview.

“He turned and scowled. ‘Hey, I’m trying to take a walk with my wife,’ he growled,’” Jaffe wrote.

Jaffe pieced together details of Sanders’ life — from his working-class roots in Brooklyn and early activism and to his political career and his presidential campaign — in the first unauthorized biography of the Democratic presidential candidate that went on sale Dec. 22.

Sanders tends to avoid personal questions, telling the New York Times Magazine in 2007, “I do not like personality profiles.” Sanders’ campaign declined to comment on the book.

The author instead relied on published materials and interviews with Sanders’ staff, friends, opponents and wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders.

Jaffe argues that, even if Sanders loses the nomination, he will matter beyond the campaign season because his message about wealth and income inequality has “become painfully relevant.”

He describes Sanders as someone who has “difficulty dealing with people who disagree with him.” But he writes that Sanders offers many Americans “hope and an opportunity to change the country’s course; from exclusion to inclusion, from hoarding to sharing, from oligarchy back to democracy.”