Herbert Agar

Herbert Sebastian Agar (29 September 1897 – 24 November 1980) was an American journalist and historian, and an editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Herbert Sebastian Agar was born September 29, 1897 in New Rochelle, New York to John G. Agar and Agnes Louis Macdonough. He graduated from Columbia University in 1919 and received his master's degree from Princeton University in 1922 and Ph.D in 1924. On June 8, 1945 Agar married Mrs Euan Wallace, widow of the former British Minister of Transport.

Agar won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1934 for his 1933 book The People's Choice, a critical look at the American presidency. Agar was associated with the Southern Agrarians and edited, with Allen Tate, Who Owns America? (1936). He was also a strong proponent of an Americanized version of the British distributist socioeconomic system.

Agar's 1950 book The Price of Union was one of John F. Kennedy's favorite books, and he kept a copy of it on his desk. A passage from The Price of Union about an act of courage by John Quincy Adams gave Kennedy the idea of writing an article about senatorial courage. He showed the passage to his speechwriter Ted Sorensen and asked him to see if he could find some more examples. This Sorensen did, and eventually they had enough for a book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage (1956).

He died on November 24, 1980 in Sussex, England, where he lived since World War II.

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