Winston Churchill as an author

English statesman and historian

• Born: November 30, 1874
• Birthplace: Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, England
• Died: January 24, 1965
• Place of death: London, England

Biography

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, a prime minister of Great Britain as well as a statesman, historian, biographer, soldier, and painter, holds a secure place in the history of nations and the history of literature. As a personality, he was the nineteenth-century hero in a twentieth-century world, bringing to the crises of a totalitarian and atomic age the urbanity, moral sense, and stubborn courage of an earlier era.

His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was at one time Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. His mother was the American-born Jennie Jerome, daughter of a wealthy financier. Because his parents were deeply involved in the social and political life of the times, the boy would have had a lonely childhood but for the loving attention of his nurse, Mrs. Everest. He had an unhappy time at various preparatory schools but did better at Harrow and began to demonstrate his future qualities of leadership while a cadet at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst.

His military career began with service as a sub-lieutenant in the Fourth Hussars, a cavalry regiment. It continued, after a journalistic tour to report on the revolution in Cuba, with the Bengal Lancers in India. He based his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, on his experiences there. In the Sudan he engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with the dervishes at the battle of Omdurman. A year later he returned to Africa as a correspondent for the Morning Post. Captured by the Boers during the South African War, he was sent to prison in Pretoria. His escape became an international sensation, and it catapulted him into public life.

In 1900 he published his novel, Savrola, and in the same year was elected to Parliament as a Conservative. He took an active part in debates and made news again when he “crossed the aisle” to the Liberal party in 1904 over the issue of free trade. His marriage in September, 1908, to Clementine Hozier, the daughter of a retired army officer, was a great social event of the London season. In the meantime he had published Lord Randolph Churchill, a biography of his father.

Churchill was first lord of the Admiralty when World War I began, but he lost his cabinet post in early 1915 after the Dardanelles disaster. After serving with the army in France he returned to become minister of munitions in 1917, secretary of state for war and air from 1918 to 1921, and colonial secretary in 1921. He returned to the Conservatives in 1924 and as Chancellor of the Exchequer achieved fame when he took over the nation’s press during the great general strike of May, 1926. The first four volumes of his monumental history of the war, The World Crisis, appeared between 1923 and 1929. Because of his opposition to self-rule for India and his conviction that England should rearm, he spent the next decade on the periphery of politics. In 1936 he advised King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis and composed the moving speech that Edward delivered in relinquishing the throne.

With the outbreak of World War II Churchill was appointed first lord of the Admiralty and soon afterward became prime minister, succeeding Neville Chamberlain, whom he had severely criticized in the months before the war. His stirring speeches, with their phrases like “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” and “We shall fight on the beaches,” made him a symbol of the national determination to be victorious. During the war he played a determining role in a series of international conferences with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, the “big three” of world politics.

After the war the Conservatives were defeated by the Labour Party in a general election in July, 1945, and Churchill was succeeded as prime minister by Clement Atlee. Responding to the developing Cold War, in a speech made at Fulton, Missouri, in March, 1946, he warned of the “iron curtain” that had come between the Soviet Union and its satellites and the rest of the world. Out of office, Churchill turned to the writing of his six-volume history, The Second World War. As the result of the 1951 election he was returned as prime minister. He served until his retirement in 1955. He then devoted himself to completing A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a project abandoned when he was called to the Admiralty in 1939.

Churchill was both a maker and recorder of history. If the writer was subordinated to the statesman, it was because through successive decades of crisis he stood at the center of the events about which he later wrote. Given the nature of his experience, his view of history was personal rather than academic. Master of a rhetorical style and a coiner of striking images and compelling epithets, he had an ability to dramatize personalities and events that is rare among professional historians. He was the only national leader to have written history on a scale commensurate with that presented in his histories of two world wars and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, works vast in design and yet illuminated at many points by his own knowledge and experience.

For his military and government work, Churchill received more than three dozen orders, decorations, and medals, as well as honorary degrees and honorary citizenship of the United States. He was also elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941 and became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1948. In recognition of his lasting contributions to historical knowledge, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953.

At the age of ninety, Winston Churchill died at his London home after experiencing a stroke in January 1965. He lay in state at Westminster Hall, a rare honor for a politician, and was given a state funeral at St. Paul's Cathedral. In the decades that followed, collections of his dispatches, speeches, correspondence, and essays were published, some for the first time.

Author Works

Nonfiction:

The Story of the Malakand Field Force, 1898

The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, 1899 (2 volumes)

London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, 1900

Ian Hamilton’s March, 1900

Lord Randolph Churchill, 1906 (2 volumes)

My African Journey, 1908

Liberalism and the Social Problem, 1909 (speeches)

The World Crisis, 1923-1937 (6 volumes)

My Early Life, 1930 (pb. in the U.S. as A Roving Commission, 1930)

India: Speeches and an Introduction, 1931

Thoughts and Adventures, 1932 (pb. in the US as Amid These Storms)

Marlborough: His Life and Times, 1933-1938 (6 volumes)

Great Contemporaries, 1937

Arms and the Covenant, 1938 (speeches; pb. in the US as While England Slept)

Step by Step: 1936–1939, 1939 (speeches)

Into Battle, 1941 (speeches; pb. in the US as Blood Sweat and Tears)

The Unrelenting Struggle, 1942 (speeches)

The End of the Beginning, 1943 (speeches)

Onwards to Victory, 1944 (speeches)

The Dawn of Liberation, 1945 (speeches)

Victory, 1946 (speeches)

Secret Session Speeches, 1946

The Sinews of Peace, 1948 (speeches)

Painting as a Pastime, 1949

Europe Unite, 1950

In the Balance, 1951

The War Speeches: Definitive Edition, 1951–52 (3 volumes)

Stemming the Tide, 1953

The Second World War, 1948-1953 (includes The Gathering Storm, 1948; Their Finest Hour, 1949; The Grand Alliance, 1950; The Hinge of Fate, 1950; Closing the Ring, 1951; and Triumph and Tragedy, 1953)

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 1956-1958 (includes The Birth of Britain, 1956; The New World, 1956; The Age of Revolution, 1957; and The Great Democracies, 1958)

The Unwritten Alliance: Speeches, 1953-1959, 1961 (Randolph S. Churchill, editor)

Young Winston's Wars: The Original Despatches of Winston S. Churchill, War Correspondent, 1897–1900, 1972 (Frederick Woods, editor)

The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 1975 (4 volumes; Michael Wolff, editor)

The Churchill War Papers, 1993-2000 (3 volumes)

Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence, 1937-1964, 1997 (Martin Gilbert, editor)

Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, 1998 (Mary Soames, editor)

The Great Republic: A History of America, 1999 (Winston S. Churchill, editor)

Long Fiction:

Savrola, 1900

Bibliography

Alldritt, Keith. Churchill the Writer: His Life as a Man of Letters. London: Hutchinson, 1992. Discusses Churchill as a writer.

Barrett, Buckley. Churchill: A Concise Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. A look at Churchill’s life, writings, and other work.

Bonham Carter, Violet. Winston Churchill: An Intimate Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965. A sympathetic biography by a friend who first met Churchill in 1906 and was in a position to observe his public and private behavior, his leadership in times of war and peace, and his reactions to both victory and defeat.

Brendon, Piers. Winston Churchill. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1984. A succinct, lively, and colorful one-volume biography.

Churchill, Randolph, and Martin Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. London: Heinemann, 1966-. This is the definitive multivolume life begun by Winston’s son, Randolph, and carried on by Gilbert, whose work is still in progress. This is a minutely detailed (sometimes day-by-day) account of every aspect of Churchill’s life and career which is partial to his own view of himself.

Churchill, Winston. Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech Fifty Years Later. Edited by James W. Muller. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Analysis of the speech which coined a household phrase and how Churchill’s take on international relations is relevant in the twenty-first century.

Churchill, Winston. The Complete Speeches of Winston Churchill. Edited by R. R. James. New York: Chelsea House, 1974.

Churchill, Winston. My Early Life: A Roving Commission, 1930. Reprint. London: Cooper, 1989. Essential reading for the Churchill scholar.

Parker, Robert. Churchill and Appeasement. London: Macmillan, 2000. Describes the events prior to World War II and Churchill’s history-making involvement.

Taylor, A. J. P., et al. Churchill Revised: A Critical Assessment. New York: Dial Press, 1969. Studies of Churchill the statesman by Taylor, the politician by J. H. Plumb, the military strategist by Basil Liddell Hart, and the man by A. Storr.

Thompson, R. W. Generalissimo Churchill. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. A study of Churchill’s skill as a military commander based on both secondary and primary sources, including interviews with his close friends and associates. Covers Churchill’s “long apprenticeship” as a war leader and his overall performance in World War II.

Wood, Ian. Churchill. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. An excellent biography.