Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill was not merely a statesman who wrote books — he was a professional writer who became a statesman, a man who supported himself by his pen for decades, who produced over forty books totalling millions of words, and who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for a body of historical writing that, whatever its deficiencies as scholarship, constitutes one of the supreme achievements of English prose in the twentieth century. His sentences have the rolling cadence of oratory, his narratives have the momentum of fiction, and his personality — combative, magnanimous, self-dramatising, and profoundly romantic — pervades every page.

The Young War Correspondent

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace in 1874, the elder son of Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome. He was educated at Harrow and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, commissioned in the 4th Hussars, and immediately began supplementing his army pay by writing dispatches for newspapers.

The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), his first book, was an account of a frontier campaign on the Northwest Frontier of India. The River War (1899), an account of Kitchener’s reconquest of the Sudan, established his reputation as a military historian and prose stylist. His dramatic escape from a Boer prisoner-of-war camp in 1899 made him a national hero and launched his political career.

Churchill wrote to earn money — he had expensive tastes and a modest inheritance — and he wrote prolifically: journalism, history, biography, a novel (Savrola, 1900), essays, and speeches. His literary earnings were substantial and necessary throughout his career.

The World Crisis and Marlborough

The World Crisis (5 volumes, 1923–1931) is Churchill’s account of World War I, written during the period of political wilderness after his failure as First Lord of the Admiralty during the Gallipoli campaign. Arthur Balfour famously described it as “an autobiography disguised as a history of the universe,” and the characterisation is not entirely unfair — Churchill placed himself at the centre of events with a frankness that could be either admirable or exasperating. But the prose is magnificent, the narrative is compelling, and the analysis of grand strategy is often brilliant.

Marlborough: His Life and Times (4 volumes, 1933–1938) is a biography of his ancestor John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, that is simultaneously a work of family piety, a defence of a maligned reputation, and a masterpiece of military history. Churchill’s account of the battles of Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet is some of the finest military writing of the twentieth century.

The Second World War

The Second World War (6 volumes, 1948–1953) is Churchill’s masterwork and the book for which he won the Nobel Prize. It is the history of the war written by its most famous participant — a personal memoir, a strategic analysis, and a political narrative combined in a work of immense scope and extraordinary readability.

The six volumes — The Gathering Storm, Their Finest Hour, The Grand Alliance, The Hinge of Fate, Closing the Ring, and Triumph and Tragedy — trace the war from the failure of appeasement through the Battle of Britain, the alliance with America and Russia, the North African and European campaigns, and the dawn of the Cold War. Churchill used his own papers, cabinet minutes, and military correspondence to construct a narrative that is inevitably partial — he is the hero of his own story — but that captures the scale, the drama, and the moral dimensions of the conflict with an authority that no subsequent historian has matched.

My Early Life

My Early Life (1930), Churchill’s autobiography of his youth — from his unhappy childhood at school through his army career and Boer War adventures to his early years in Parliament — is his most purely enjoyable book: witty, self-deprecating, vivid, and written with a narrative skill that makes it read like the best adventure fiction.

The Nobel Prize and the Literary Churchill

Churchill’s Nobel Prize in Literature (1953) — awarded “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values” — recognised something that the literary establishment has never been entirely comfortable with: that Churchill was a major writer, not merely a politician who wrote. His prose style — Gibbonian in its rolling periods, Macaulayan in its narrative momentum, and entirely Churchillian in its combination of grandeur and earthiness — is one of the great styles of twentieth-century English. The speeches alone — “We shall fight on the beaches,” “Their finest hour,” “Never in the field of human conflict” — constitute a body of rhetorical art that has no parallel in modern political life.

Yet the literary value of Churchill’s histories is contested. Professional historians note that The Second World War is self-serving, that it omits or distorts episodes that reflect poorly on its author, and that its strategic analysis, while brilliant, is inevitably the view from Downing Street. The Nobel committee honoured Churchill as much for what he represented — courage, eloquence, the defence of civilisation against barbarism — as for the books themselves. Whether this is a legitimate criterion for a literary prize is a question that has never been satisfactorily answered.

Collecting Churchill

Churchill’s works are among the most extensively collected of any twentieth-century author. The Story of the Malakand Field Force (Longmans, Green, 1898) in first edition is his first book and a major collecting target. The World Crisis (Thornton Butterworth, 1923–1931, 5 volumes) and The Second World War (Cassell, 1948–1953, 6 volumes) in first editions are the key historical works. Savrola (Longmans, 1900), his only novel, is scarce. Frederick Woods’s A Bibliography of the Works of Sir Winston Churchill is the standard reference.