2023年12月15日 星期五

Ted Morgan FDR: A Biography, “Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs” (1988) and “An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Barbie Trial, and the City of Lyon, 1940-1945” (1990). “On Becoming American”. Churchill: A Young Man in A Hurry,



Ted Morgan  FDR: A Biography, “Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs” (1988) and “An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Barbie Trial, and the City of Lyon, 1940-1945” (1990). “On Becoming American”.  Churchill: A Young Man in A Hurry, 

Ted Morgan (March 30, 1932 – December 13, 2023) was a FrenchAmerican biographer, journalist, and historian.





His most critically lauded books were published under the name Ted Morgan. They included “FDR: A Biography” (1985), “Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs” (1988) and “An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Barbie Trial, and the City of Lyon, 1940-1945” (1990).


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After his father died in a training flight, Morgan began to lead two parallel lives. He attended Yale University (where he was a member of Manuscript Society) and worked as a reporter. But he was still a member (albeit a reluctant one) of the French nobility. He was drafted into the French Army where he served for two years from 1955 to 1957, during the Algerian War, initially as a second lieutenant with a Senegalese regiment of Colonial Infantry and then as a propaganda officer. He subsequently wrote in frank detail of his brutalizing experiences while on active service in the bled (Algerian countryside) and of the atrocities committed by both sides during the Battle of Algiers.[1]

Following his military service, Morgan returned to the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, Edition Time in 1961 for what was described as "his moving account of the death of Leonard Warren on the Metropolitan Opera stage."[2] At the time, Morgan was still a French citizen writing under the name of "Sanche de Gramont".

In the 1970s, Morgan stopped using the byline "Sanche de Gramont". He became an American citizen in 1977, renouncing his titles of nobility. The name he adopted as a U.S. citizen, "Ted Morgan", is an anagram of "de Gramont". The new name was a conscious attempt to discard his aristocratic French past. He had settled on a "name that conformed with the language and cultural norms of American society, a name that telephone operators and desk clerks could hear without flinching" (On Becoming American, 1978). Morgan was featured in the CBS news program 60 Minutes in 1978. The segment explored Morgan's reasons for embracing American culture.

Morgan wrote biographies of William S. BurroughsFranklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The last-named was a finalist in the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.[3] His 1980 biography of W. Somerset Maugham was a 1982 National Book Award finalist in its first paperback edition.[4][a] He also wrote for newspapers and magazines.


Mr. Morgan covered topics as varied as opera, advertising, the police, Nazi war criminals, laid-back California living, the legal aspects of pornography, and politics, both in the United States and abroad.


As he demonstrated in biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Mr. Morgan did not hesitate to tackle subjects that had already been plumbed by authors with more scholarly credentials. But few writers could assemble dry facts and telling details with more gusto and brio.



Ted Morgan (March 30, 1932 – December 13, 2023) was a FrenchAmerican biographer, journalist, and historian.

A black-and-white photo of Mr. Morgan holding up a copy of his book “On Becoming America” and smiling. The cover includes small partial pictures of the French and American flags and the subtitle “A celebration of what it means and how it feels.”

Mr. Morgan in 1978, the year his “On Becoming American” was published. By taking up American citizenship and changing his name, he claimed to have shed his European elitism for egalitarian principles.Credit...Ray Stubblebine/Associated Press

Image
A book cover with a black-and-white photo of a young Winston Churchill, wearing a top hat, and the words “Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry — 1874-1915” and the name Ted Morgan in stylized red letters on a tan background.
“A life so full could easily have meandered into tedium,” one reviewer wrote of Mr. Morgan’s Winston Churchill biography, “and this almost never happens in Mr. Morgan’s treatment.”Credit...Touchstone

Selected books[edit]

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