Background
Mowrer, Edgar Ansel, , Illinois 1892 1977 Male Author Journalist journalist and author, was born in Bloomington, Ill. , the son of Rufus Mowrer, a businessman, and Nell Scott.
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Edgar Mowrer
Edit ProfileEducation
The family moved in 1898 to the South Side of Chicago, where Mowrer grew up and graduated in 1909 from Hyde Park High School.
He enrolled that fall at the University of Michigan but transferred the next year to the University of Chicago.
Mowrer spent a year attending lectures at the Sorbonne, writing, and immersing himself in the student life of the Latin Quarter.
On a train from London to Liverpool, England, on his way home to Chicago, he encountered a young Englishwoman, Lilian May Thomson, who also had studied in Paris and became a noted writer.
Career
Later, Mowrer wrote to his brother that he had met the woman he intended to marry.
He returned to the United States and the University of Michigan, where he received a B. A. in 1913.
That pursuit was short-circuited by the outbreak of World War I.
When Paul Mowrer left Paris in 1914 to cover the fighting in Belgium, he recruited his brother to take over the Paris office of the Chicago Daily News.
Paul wrote that his brother "took to journalism like a squirrel to a tree.
He had judgment, facility, and initiative.
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With his insatiable curiosity [he] combined a determined courage. "
His eyewitness dispatches were among the first battlefront descriptions of the war by an American journalist.
In Italy, Mowrer met Benito Mussolini and covered the Italian army's retreat at Caporetto.
Mussolini, then a newspaper editor, favored Italy's joining the Allies.
In Germany, Mowrer chronicled the rise of the Nazis in dispatches that won him the Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence in 1933.
He was among the first journalists to recognize the threat Adolf Hitler represented to European peace.
After being expelled from Germany, Mowrer returned to Paris in 1934, replacing his brother, who had been named editor of the Daily News.
From this post he covered the early days of the Spanish civil war, Hitler's escalating demands, and France and Britain's appeasement policies.
Mowrer's reporting so outraged the Nazis that Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels once said that he would give a division of troops to capture him.
Mowrer also reported from the Soviet Union and China.
By 1937, both Mussolini and Stalin had expelled him from their countries.
In 1940, Mowrer left France just ahead of the advancing German army, writing dispatches along the way from cafe tables and park chairs and, once, typing a report on the hood of a car.
Using an old visa that he had altered to obscure the date, he slipped across the border into Spain.
Mowrer returned to the United States and was assigned to the Daily News Washington bureau.
After the United States entered World War II, he became deputy director of the United States Office of Facts and Figures under Archibald MacLeish, an operation that later merged with the Office of War Information (OWI).
The Post dropped Mowrer's column in 1948, but another syndicate picked it up.
After the war he concentrated on calling attention to the peril of Soviet expansionism.
He was an ardent anti-Communist who urged a hard line against the Soviet Union.
Peaceful coexistence, he wrote, "was the opium of the West. "
He wrote three books analyzing postwar American foreign policy: The Nightmare of American Foreign Policy (1948), Challenge and Decision (1950), and An End to Make-Believe (1961).
In them he made an "appeal to free men to make victory in the Cold War their immediate purpose.
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Published in English and French, it was described as "offering a truly intercontinental forum, a continual two-way conversation" between North Atlantic nations.
The magazine folded in 1960 owing to lack of funds.
Mowrer continued writing his syndicated column and other articles until his retirement in 1969.
[Mowrer's papers are in the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.
Books by Mowrer include Immortal Italy (1922), This American World (1928), Sinon; or, The Future of Politics (1930), The Dragon Wakes (1939), Global War (1942, with Marthe Rajchman), A Good Time to Be Alive (1959), Triumph and Turmoil (1968), and Umano and the Price of Lasting Peace (1973, with Lilian Thomson Mowrer).
His series of articles written with William Donovan, "Fifth Column Lessons for America" (1940), was distributed to all newspapers in the United States and was reprinted by the American Council on Public Affairs.
See also Lilian T. Mowrer, Journalist's Wife (1937).
An obituary is in the New York Times, Mar. 4, 1977. ]
Religion
A collection of letters received by Mowrer from readers of his column (1952 - 1969) is in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison.
Politics
After recovering from a near-fatal case of influenza, Mowrer was named Rome bureau chief and reported on the rise of fascism in Italy until he accepted the post of Berlin bureau chief in 1923.
Connections
In January 1911, he left school in Chicago bound for Paris to visit his brother, a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.
He and Lilian Thomson were married in London on Feb. 10, 1916, and she joined him in Rome.
They had one child, a daughter.
