Background
He was born on August 23, 1897 in New York City, New York, United States, the son of James Maxwell Pringle, a pharmacist, and Marie Juergens.
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(BOUND IN GENUINE LEATHER, GOLD EDGING)
BOUND IN GENUINE LEATHER, GOLD EDGING
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He was born on August 23, 1897 in New York City, New York, United States, the son of James Maxwell Pringle, a pharmacist, and Marie Juergens.
He graduated from high school in New York. Later, in 1920 he graduated from Cornell University with a B. A. degree.
After school he served briefly in the army during World War I, but did not go overseas. He worked for the New York Evening Sun until 1922, then for the New York Globe (1922 - 1924) and the New York World (1924 - 1927).
During the 1920's Pringle emerged as a latter-day muckraker. "His Master's Voice, " his account of Ivy Lee, press agent for the Rockefellers, was a candid piece of reporting appropriate to the pages of the American Mercury. He did vignettes of Judge Eugene Gary, Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York City, and Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis in much the same idiom. These sketches were collected under the title Big Frogs (1928). Though they were described as "libelous, untrue, inaccurate and mischievous, " Pringle considered them "impartial and objective personality sketches. "
Pringle's career took a prosperous turn in the 1930's. In 1932 he joined the School of Journalism at Columbia University. At the close of the decade he brought out his most ambitious book, the two-volume The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (1939). He remained at Columbia until 1943, when he moved to Washington, District of Columbia, to work for the Office of War Information.
After the war Pringle wrote for the New Yorker, Harper's, Collier's and the New York Times Book Review. With his second wife he wrote a dual biography of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, which was unfinished at his death. In any case, Pringle's verdict on Roosevelt was accepted by the reading public as well as by most professional historians. Pringle set himself the task of doing a large-scale account of William Howard Taft. His biography of Taft was a more balanced and thoughtful piece of work than the Roosevelt study. He had unlimited access to the large collection of Taft papers.
He died at Washington, District of Columbia.
Henry F. Pringle was established as a major biographer of twentieth-century public men. He was most famous for his biography of Theodore Roosevelt which won the Pulitzer prize in 1932. Pringle was the first, who merely encouraged people to see all sides of Roosevelt, as the biography provided information that had been avoided in previous accounts of Roosevelt’s life. He also was the author of a less successful biography of Howard William Taft.
(BOUND IN GENUINE LEATHER, GOLD EDGING)
He expressed optimism about the future of biographical writing, observing that as long as people were curious about heroes and villains of the past, biography would continue to have a place in both history and literature.
On September 26, 1926, Pringle married Helena Huntington Smith, a journalist, novelist, and, according to Pringle, "a mean and nasty critic. " They had three children. On May 23, 1944, his prior marriage having ended in divorce, Pringle married Katharine Douglas.
