Curtis Bill Pepper

Curtis Bill Pepper (August 30, 1917 – April 4, 2014) was an American journalist and author. Pepper was Newsweek's Mediterranean bureau chief in Rome from 1957 to 1969. He also worked for Edward R. Murrow at the Rome bureau of CBS, and covered the Vatican for United Press. Of his seven books, the last work, Leonardo, was a biographical novel of Leonardo da Vinci. It was conceived in the years following his studies of the Italian Renaissance at the University of Florence.

Pepper was born Curtis G. Pepper II in Huntington, West Virginia. After a boyhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Champagne, Illinois, he entered the University of Illinois, majoring in art and architecture while writing for the student newspaper, The Daily Illini. During the summer vacation of his second year, he handled the city-desk phones for the New York Post, followed by front-page reports to the New York World -Telegram while cycling through Europe. Upon his return, he worked for the paper’s cultural desk, interviewing stage and screen celebrities, until leaving to edit the Palm Springs News in California. During World War II, he joined MIS-X, a specialized branch of military intelligence dealing with combat deception, escape and evasion, and edited the MIS-X manual for the U.S. Army, while also lecturing on this subject at military and air corps bases throughout the U.S. Assigned to the Italian theater, he joined A-Force, a field unit of MIS-X on the 5th Army front – covertly setting up “rat lines” behind the German lines to bring back downed pilots and escaped prisoners of war. From there, he was assigned to MI-9, an escape and evasion command in the British 8th Army, where he was twice cited in dispatches. From the U.S. Army, he received a Bronze Star for wartime services.

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