DEATH OF A BIOGRAPHER (via Bryan Francoeur):

Manchester, Biographer of Churchill, Dies at 82 (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 6/01/04)

Historian William Manchester, who brought a novelist's flair to his stirring biographies of such 20th century giants as Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur and John F. Kennedy, died of cancer Tuesday at 82.

Manchester wrote 18 books, including two novels, but was best known in recent years for his magisterial, multivolume biography of Churchill, ``The Last Lion.'' Two strokes prevented Manchester from completing the much-anticipated third volume, covering most of the World War II years.

Just last month, Paul Reid, a feature writer at The Palm Beach Post, was chosen to help finish the book.

"He wrote histories or biographies that just take you right there and illuminate, teach, enlighten and anger,'' Reid said.

Manchester died in his sleep at his home in Middletown, his daughter Laurie Manchester said.

"He would have wanted to be remembered as a writer first and foremost, and then as a historian,'' she said. ``Writing came to him easily, it was like breathing.'' [...]

His 1978 biography of MacArthur, American Caesar, received a National Book Award nomination and became the basis for a movie.

The first volume of his anticipated three-book biography of Churchill, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932, was published in 1983. The sequel, The Last Lion: Alone 1932-1940, came out in 1988.

Despite mixed reviews, the Churchill books sold hundreds of thousands of copies. They were so beloved that when the U.S. Navy commissioned a guided-missile destroyer named after Churchill, it installed signed copies of Manchester's books in the ship's library.

The most personal of his works was an attempt to exorcise demons and recurring wartime nightmares -- Goodbye, Darkness, published in 1980. Manchester describes growing up in Attleboro, Mass., as the son of a wounded World War I Marine. The book relates Manchester's World War II experiences on Okinawa, where he was wounded twice, and his visits to other Pacific battlegrounds during the late 1970s.

In his concluding note to the book, Manchester wrote: ``This, then, was the life I knew, where death sought me, during which I was transformed from a cheeky youth to a troubled man who, for over 30 years, repressed what he could not bear to remember.''

Most have probably read the Churchill biographies, the first volume of which is particularly good, but the war memoir and the MacArthur bio are both very good also.

Glory and the Dream is most interesting as an artifact of the conventional liberal view of the mid-20th Century. It becomes downright hilarious when read alongside the corrective Modern Times by Paul Johnson.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2004 6:29 PM