Rick Atkinson

Rick Atkinson (2013)

Rick Atkinson (* 16th November 1952 in Munich as Lawrence Rush Atkinson IV ) is an American journalist, military historian and nonfiction author.

Atkinson grew up as the son of a US officer stationed here at various military locations. After studying English at the University of Chicago ( Master's degree in 1975), he became a journalist, from 1977 with the Kansas City Times , where he began as a police reporter and later for the domestic affairs department in Washington, DC , and from 1983 with the Washington Post , where he was head of the Berlin office from 1993 to 1996 and during this time also reported on the wars in Somalia and Bosnia as well as NATO . He was also Assistant Manager of the Washington Post for Research (1996) and Deputy National Editor for national defense, diplomacy and intelligence issues from 1985 to 1988. In 1991 he directed the Washington Post's coverage of the Gulf War.

In 2013 he gave the Harmon Memorial Lecture in Military History at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and the Perspectives in Military History Lecture Series at the United States Army War College in Carlisle.

He won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with the Washington Post for reporting on police shootings in Washington DC, and the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for domestic reporting (then at the Kansas City Times, under for a series about the West Point graduating class from 1966, which suffered heavy losses in the Vietnam War, and the collapse of the Hyatt Regency Walkway in Kansas City) and in 2003 for history for the book An Army at Dawn , which was also published by Henry Adams in 2003 Prize received. He also received the George Polk Award (1989) and the Gerald R. Ford Award in 2007 for his reports. In 2013 he received the Special Award from the New York Military Affairs Symposium .

In 2010 he received the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing . In 2004/05 he was General Omar N. Bradley Professor of Strategic Leadership at the US Army War College and Dickinson College. In 2009 he received the Axel Springer Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. In 2014 he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize .

He is married to National Institutes of Health doctor Jane C. Atkinson, has two children and lives in Washington DC

Fonts

• The volumes of his Liberation Trilogy on American participation in the European theater of war in World War II:
  • An Army at Dawn, The War in North Africa 1942–1943, Henry Holt 2002
  • The Day of Battle, The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-1944, Henry Holt 2007
  • The Guns at Last Light: The War in Europe 1944-1945, Henry Holt 2013
• D-Day. The Invasion of Normandy 1944, Macmillan 2014
• In the company of soldiers: a chronicle of battle, New York: Henry Holt 2004 (History of the 101st Airborne Division under General David Petraeus in the Iraq War)
• The long gray line: The american journey of West Point´s class of 1966, Henry Holt, 1989, 2010 (History of the West Point graduation class of 1966)
• Crusade: The untold story of the persian gulf war, Houghton Mifflin 1993 (History of the Gulf War )

Web links

• Pulitzer Prize 2003