William Raymond Manchester

William Raymond Manchester (born April 1, 1922 in Attleboro , Massachusetts , † June 1, 2004 in Middletown , Connecticut ) was an American historian and writer. Manchester gained fame - the eighteen books of which have been translated into twenty languages ​​- primarily because of its historical works on the Pacific War in World War II and because of its standard work, The Last Lion, on the British statesman Sir Winston Churchill .

Life

After the attack on the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor in December 1941 Manchester enlisted - like his father in the First World War - the US Marines Corps . In the following years he took an active part in the war in the Pacific. He served on Guadalcanal and was seriously wounded by an exploding missile in the Battle of Okinawa .

After the war, Manchester first worked as a copyist for the Daily Oklahoman , before resuming college, which he completed in 1946 with a bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts and a master's degree from the University of Missouri.

In 1947 Manchester began working for the daily newspaper The Baltimore Sun, where he met the press man Henry L. Mencken , who characterized himself as a "conservative anarchist" , on whom he wrote his master's thesis and who also became the protagonist of his first book, Disturber of the Peace . which appeared in 1951. In 1955 Manchester gave up his journalistic career to work as editor for Wesleyan University, where he worked for the remainder of his professional life as a history professor and freelance writer.

Manchester wrote a bestseller with the 1967 documentary report The Death of a President . This traces in detail the history of the murder of US President John F. Kennedy - with whom Manchester had been personal friends since the 1940s - in November 1963 by describing the movements of Kennedy and his prospective murderer Lee Harvey Oswald - beginning in the last months before the assassination attempt and ending with its execution - reconstructed in order to finally speak out in favor of the so-called "single perpetrator thesis", which states that Oswald did not act as part of a conspiracy but on his own. Due to Manchester's stance toward Lyndon B. Johnson's administration , Robert F. Kennedy , who initially supported the project, withdrew his support for the book, while Jacqueline Kennedy , the assassinated president's widow , withdrew from publication of the work - which she initially did authorized - sought to prevent it by filing a lawsuit. The lawsuit was settled in 1967, reportedly after Manchester agreed not to remove unspecified passages about the Kennedy family's private life from his manuscript. In the 1977 article Controversy , Manchester described the Kennedys' attempts to suppress the book.

Manchester wrote the report Pacific Theater, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War about his experiences in the Pacific War . Manchester also dealt extensively with the same events in his work American Caesar, a biography of the American General Douglas MacArthur , on which he had started as a staunch opponent of MacArthur, and finally his opinion in the course of his intensive examination of the personality of the ambitious general to revise completely and to finish the work as its enthusiastic admirer.

In the German-speaking area, Manchester's book The Krupps, a dynasty that followed the history of the famous armaments manufacturer dynasty from the Ruhr area over several generations, received special attention.

In the 1980s, Manchester ventured into his most ambitious project: a monumental biography of the British statesman Sir Winston Churchill, which was laid out in three volumes. After he had already completed two volumes, which trace Churchill's life from 1874 to 1932 and 1932 to 1940, to the exuberant enthusiasm of the critics, he finished work on the third and last volume of the work in 1998, after the death of his wife and two Strokes, prematurely. This third volume (The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm) was completed by journalist Paul Reid and published in 2012.

Works

• Disturber of the Peace. The Life of HL Mencken (1951)
• The City of Anger, a novel. (1953)
  • German translation: Stadt des Zorns, Kindler 1969
• Shadow of the Monsoon (1956)
• A Rockefeller Family Portrait, from John D. to Nelson (1959)
• The Long Gainer, a novel (1961)
• Portrait of a President, John F. Kennedy in profile (1964)
• The Death of a President: November 20-November 25 (1967)
  • German translation: The death of the president, S. Fischer 1967
• The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty that Armed Germany at War (1968)
  • German translation: Krupp, Kindler 1969, Heyne TB 1978
• The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 (1974)
• Controversy and other essays in journalism (1976)
• American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 (1978)
• On Mencken, essays (1980)
• Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (1980)
• One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering Kennedy (1983)
• The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 (1983)
• "Okinawa: The Bloodiest ...", an essay. (1987)
• The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Alone 1932-1940 (1988)
  • German translation: Winston Churchill, 2 volumes, Bertelsmann 1989, 1990
• In Our Time: The World As Seen by Magnum Photographers (1989)
• A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance - Portrait of an Age (1992)
• Magellan (1994)
• No End Save Victory (2001)
• The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm (with Paul Reid) (2012)