William Manchester

William Manchester was the last great narrative historian — a writer who combined meticulous research with a prose style of extraordinary vividness, energy, and dramatic power to produce books that read like novels but were grounded in archival scholarship. His three-volume biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion (1983–2012, the final volume completed after Manchester’s death by Paul Reid), was the most ambitious biographical project of the postwar period. His account of the Kennedy assassination, The Death of a President (1967), was the most thoroughly researched narrative of those terrible four days. His memoir of the Pacific War, Goodbye, Darkness (1980), was one of the finest American war memoirs. And his panoramic social history The Glory and the Dream (1974) told the story of America from 1932 to 1972 in 1,400 pages of relentlessly readable prose.

Springfield and the Marines

William Raymond Manchester was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, in 1922 and grew up in Springfield. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps after Pearl Harbor and served in the Pacific, fighting on Guadalcanal and Okinawa, where he was severely wounded. His war experience haunted him for decades and eventually produced Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (1980), in which Manchester returned to the Pacific islands where he had fought and confronted the memories he had suppressed for thirty-five years. The book is one of the finest American war memoirs — unflinching about the horror of combat and honest about the disturbing truth that part of him had loved it.

After the war, Manchester attended the University of Massachusetts and the University of Missouri, became a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and began his career as a biographer and historian.

The Kennedy Connection

Manchester’s relationship with the Kennedy family defined the middle of his career. Portrait of a President: John F. Kennedy in Profile (1962) was written with Kennedy’s cooperation. After the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy chose Manchester to write the authorised account, giving him exclusive access to interviews, documents, and witnesses. The Death of a President: November 20–November 25, 1963 (1967) was the result — a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the assassination and its aftermath that remains the most detailed and most dramatically powerful account of those events. The book was nearly suppressed by the Kennedy family, who objected to its revelations about their private behaviour during the crisis.

The Last Lion

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill was Manchester’s masterwork — a three-volume biography planned on the grandest scale:

1. Visions of Glory, 1874–1932 (1983)
2. Alone, 1932–1940 (1988)
3. Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 (2012, completed by Paul Reid)

The first two volumes, written entirely by Manchester, are among the finest biographical writing in the English language. Manchester’s Churchill is a vivid, commanding, larger-than-life figure rendered with a narrative energy and a gift for scene-setting that make the biography read like a historical novel. The prose is muscular, dramatic, and deliberately old-fashioned — Manchester wrote in the tradition of the great Victorian narrativists — and the research was exhaustive.

Manchester’s health declined in the 1990s, and he was unable to complete the third volume. Paul Reid, a journalist, was chosen to finish the work using Manchester’s notes and research. The third volume was published in 2012, eight years after Manchester’s death.

Other Works

American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 (1978) was a controversial biography that treated MacArthur with more sympathy than most historians. The Arms of Krupp, 1587–1968 (1968) was a history of the Krupp steel dynasty and its role in German militarism. A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance (1992) was a popular history of the Middle Ages that was criticised by medieval historians for its inaccuracies but praised by general readers for its narrative verve.

Collecting Manchester

The Death of a President (Harper & Row, 1967) in first edition is the Kennedy assassination classic. The Last Lion volumes (Little, Brown, 1983 and 1988) are the major biographical works. Goodbye, Darkness (Little, Brown, 1980) is the Pacific memoir. American Caesar (Little, Brown, 1978) is the MacArthur biography. Manchester signed books willingly; inscribed copies are available.