January 1, 1970

Introduced by Richard M. Langworth

Churchill was a natural writer, a stylist. The soaring oratory people heard in the Second World War occurred because Britain was led by a professional writer. This article surveys Churchill’s writing habits and four of his most exciting books: The River War, an adventure on the Nile; The World Crisis, a lyrical memoir of the First World War; My Early Life, his charming autobiography; and The Dream, the haunting tale of meeting the ghost of his father just after the Second World War.

Along with history, politics and biography, Churchill explored odd little corners of life: cartoons and cartoonists, British Summer Time, women in war, Moses, the Boy Scouts. He even wondered, ‘Are There Men on the Moon?’ From America he wrote of ‘The Land of Corn and Lobsters’. In all he published fifteen million words including, after his death, his ‘Complete Speeches’ and ‘Collected Works’ (forty six volumes, 28,000 pages). His writing had a financial side: at his peak Churchill was the highest-paid journalist in the world. ‘I lived’, as he put it, ‘from mouth to hand.’

Read the full article here: ‘Churchill and the Art of the Statesman-Writer’, by Richard M. Langworth, in Finest Hour 102, Spring 1999.