With its proximity to the cultural hub of New York City and its quieter suburban and rural landscapes, Connecticut was fertile ground for artists and writers in the period of Modernist movements between 1913 and 1979. Many of these cultural figures are well known through biographical and critical studies. Creative Places seeks to show how place played a significant role in creative work, and how in turn the artists and writers influenced communities in Connecticut.
William Manchester
Education/Curation, Fiction, Journalism/Non-Fiction
1922 – 2004
William Manchester was a biographer who used his novelist’s skills to fashion meticulously researched portraits of power, among them Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Winston Churchill and, perhaps most famously, John F. Kennedy. In Connecticut, Manchester was a writer at Wesleyan University for two decades as well as an editor at Wesleyan University Press in its early years. Following the publication of ‘The Death of a President,’ Manchester was able to build a striking modernist house for himself and his wife, on the outskirts of Middletown.
- Biography/Description of Work
In 1940 William Manchester graduated from Classical High School in Springfield, Mass., where the family had moved after Manchester’s father died. He enrolled in the University of Massachusetts, majoring in English and supporting himself by working in the college store during the school year. In 1942 he entered the Marines and received the Purple Heart for wounds received on Okinawa. His experiences as a sergeant in the Marines is the subject of ‘Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War’ (1980), in which he meditated on why he left a hospital where he was recovering from a superficial gunshot wound to return to combat, where he was again wounded, this time so severely that he almost died. After his discharge, he returned to college and graduated first in his class in 1946. He attended graduate school at the University of Missouri, where he received a master’s degree in English, writing his thesis on H. L. Mencken. The thesis later became the basis for his first biography, ‘Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H. L. Mencken,’ which was published by Harper in 1951 to favorable reviews. After a few years in daily journalism — at The Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City in 1946, and at The Baltimore Sun as a local reporter and foreign correspondent from 1947 to 1954 — Manchester became confidential secretary to Mencken in 1954. Mencken, who guided and encouraged Mr. Manchester, had suffered a stroke, and Mr. Manchester read him ‘the morning newspapers, the complete works of Conrad and Twain — Huckleberry Finn twice — and the prefaces of Shaw.’ During this period Manchester tried his hand at fiction. His novel ‘The City of Anger,’ published in 1953, concerned corruption in a city much like Baltimore. Mencken died in 1956.
In the summer of 1955, Manchester was hired by American Education Publications (AEP) to be assistant managing editor of high school periodicals for the Department of School Services and Publications. Wesleyan University had acquired AEP, publisher of My Weekly Reader, in 1949. Manchester moved to Middletown in June,1955 and was soon promoted from assistant to managing editor. The Wesleyan University Press was founded in 1957 with My Weekly Reader as a component. In Middletown, Manchester wrote a second novel, ‘Shadow of the Monsoon,’ set in India. Two years later in 1959, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and was made a resident fellow of the newly-formed Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan, a post he would hold for many years. His next book, in 1958, was ‘Beard the Lion,’ a mystery set in the Middle East, followed in 1961 by ‘The Long Gainer,’ about an academic scandal. His first work of nonfiction was ‘A Rockefeller Family Portrait,’ an approving study published in 1959. William Manchester’s popular histories relied on exhaustive research. His recounting of minute detail was one of the hallmarks of his works, which were attempts to re-create in narrative form a feeling of immediacy: MacArthur’s flight from Corregidor in 1942 in ‘American Caesar,’ the eccentricities of the family that fed the German war machine in ‘The Arms of Krupp, 1587-1968’ or the microscopic reconstruction of the events of Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas in ‘The Death of a President.’
Following the publication of ‘The Death of a President,’ Manchester was able to build a striking modernist house for himself and his wife, on the outskirts of Middletown.- Sources view
- Severo, Richard. Obituary. New York Times, June 2, 2004.
Wesleyan Unversity Archives. [ https://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/schome/FAs/ma1000-169.xml#idp104014688 ] - Associated Resource(s)