Walter Lord
| Walter Lord | |
|---|---|
Walter Lord, 1958
|
|
| Born |
October 8, 1917 Baltimore, Maryland |
| Died | May 19, 2002 (aged 84) Manhattan, New York |
| Resting place | Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Princeton University; Yale Law School |
| Period | 1952–1986 |
| Genre | Narrative history |
| Notable awards | Francis Parkman Prize for Special Achievement (1994) |
John Walter Lord, Jr. (October 8, 1917 – May 19, 2002), was an American author, best known for his documentary-style non-fiction account A Night to Remember (1955), about the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
Lord was born in Baltimore, Maryland to John Walterhouse Lord and Henrietta neé Hoffman on October 8, 1917. His father, who was a lawyer, died when Lord was just three years old. Lord's grandfather, Richard Curzon Hoffman, was president of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company ("Old Bay Line") steamship firm in the 1890s.
In July 1926, at the age of 9, Lord traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York to Cherbourg and Southampton, on the RMS Olympic, the Titanic's sister ship. Following high school at Baltimore's Gilman School, he studied history at Princeton University and graduated in 1939. Lord then enrolled at Yale Law School, interrupting his studies to join the United States Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. During World War II, he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services as a code clerk in London, in 1942. He was the agency's secretariat when the war ended in 1945. Afterwards, Lord returned to Yale, where he earned a degree in law.
Lord wrote, or edited and annotated 11 bestselling books on such diverse subjects as Pearl Harbor (Day of Infamy, 1957), the Battle of Midway (Incredible Victory, 1967), the Battle of the Alamo (A Time to Stand, 1961), the Battle of Baltimore (The Dawn's Early Light, 1972), Arctic exploration (Peary to the Pole, 1963), pre-World War I America (The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War, 1960), Coastwatchers (Lonely Vigil, 1977), and the civil rights struggle (The Past That Would Not Die, 1965).
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