(John Crocker has been the friend of the Celebrity, long b...)
John Crocker has been the friend of the Celebrity, long before he became famous. During a summer retreat at Asquith resort, he runs into the Celebrity, who has taken the identity of another man for anonymity. The Celebrity meets Irene Trevor, the daughter of an Ohio state senator, and asks her to marry him. When a more desirable female, Marian Thorn, arrives at Asquith, the Celebrity leaves her without breaking off the engagement. That goes against the moral fiber of the Celebrity's stories. Both women know his true identity as a famous writer and are familiar with his published works. Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke and his wife are wealthy and have made a summer retreat of their own named Mohair. The Celebrity leaves Asquith for Mohair to be with Marian Thorn, who is the niece of the Cookes. The slighted Irene Trevor confides in John Crocker that the Celebrity never broke up with her, and that could be used against him later.
(This story is set in the years just before the United Sta...)
This story is set in the years just before the United States Civil War, primarily in divided Missouri. A young man with Union and abolitionist leanings get involved with a strong Southern family.
(The story is that of a young United States Naval officer ...)
The story is that of a young United States Naval officer meeting and eloping with a young British lady on the island of Madeira and of the, sometimes humorous, secretive arrangements made by one of his friends from the crew of the ship to facilitate the elopement.
(This is a fascinating tale of an orphan boy who grows up ...)
This is a fascinating tale of an orphan boy who grows up in frontier Kentucky sheds light on some forgotten aspects of early American history. The main character/narrator, Davy, recounts his travels with George Rogers Clark, who assembled a volunteer army to seize British outposts north of the Ohio River during the American Revolution.
(It may as well begin this story with Mr. Hilary Vane, mor...)
It may as well begin this story with Mr. Hilary Vane, more frequently addressed as the Honourable Hilary Vane, although it was the gentleman's proud boast that he had never held an office in his life. He belonged to the Vanes of Camden Street, a beautiful village in the hills near Ripton, and was in common with some other great men who had made a noise in New York and the nation, a graduate of Camden Wentworth Academy. But Mr. Vane, when he was at home, lived on a maple-shaded street in the city of Ripton, cared for by an elderly housekeeper who had more edges than a new-fangled mowing machine. The house was a porticoed one which had belonged to the Austens for a hundred years or more, for Hilary Vane had married, towards middle age, Miss Sarah Austen. In two years, he was a widower, and he never tried it again; he had the Austens' house, and that many-edged woman, Euphrasia Cotton, the Austens' housekeeper. The house was of wood and painted white as regularly as a leap year. From the street front to the vegetable garden in the extreme rear, it was exceedingly long, and perhaps for propriety's sake, Hilary Vane lived at one end of it and Euphrasia at the other. Hilary was sixty-five, Euphrasia seventy, which is not old for frugal people, though it is just as well to add that there had never been a breath of scandal about either of them, in Ripton or elsewhere. For the Honourable Hilary's modest needs, one-room sufficed, and the front parlor had not been used since poor Sarah Austen's demise thirty years before this story opens.
(The Crisis is a romance set amidst the turmoil of the Ame...)
The Crisis is a romance set amidst the turmoil of the American Civil War. The divisions that threatened to tear apart the country before the Civil War were nowhere more apparent than in St. Louis. On the border between North and South, civilization and the frontier, it was host to passionate sympathizers on both sides of the slavery issue. When a young abolitionist lawyer falls for the daughter of a Southern gentleman, the turbulent political atmosphere creates a seemingly impossible barrier. Can a meeting with Abraham Lincoln change everything? A meticulously-researched work, filled with real historical figures, The Crisis is a gripping read for history buffs and romantics alike.
(Mr. Churchill has reopened what he considers the fundamen...)
Mr. Churchill has reopened what he considers the fundamental breach between science and religion. Drawing his clue from the great Hebrew prophets and thinkers, Mr. Churchill has brought to light and reconstructed what appears to be man's oldest psychology, lost and overlooked for almost two millenniums, but one which throws entirely new light on the foundations of Christianity, and indeed on civilization itself.
Winston Churchill was an American writer, artist, and politician. His early novels were historical, but his later works he wrote about contemporary America. He wrote in the naturalist style of literature, and some have called him the most influential of the American naturalists.
Background
Winston Churchill was born on November 10, 1871, in Saint Louis, Missouri. He was the son of Edward Spaulding, an import merchant, and Emma Bell Blaine Churchill. Churchill's mother died soon after his birth, and Louisa and James Gazams, Emma's half-sister and brother-in-law, raised him.
Education
Winston Churchill's relatives sent him to the Smith Academy in Saint Louis as an adolescent. Then, he graduated from the United States Naval Academy, where he received a degree in 1894.
After graduation, Winston Churchill served in the Navy mostly as editor of the Army and Navy Journal. He quit the Navy to start a writing career. He also worked briefly as an editor at Cosmopolitan. Winston Churchill was best known for his earnest, naive historical romances.
After his marriage, Winston produced a manuscript version of The Celebrity: An Episode, which he left with the Macmillan editors. After much prodding from the publishing house, he eventually finished the novel, which became hit.
With a big encouragement, Winston embarked on his most famous historical novel, Richard Carvel. It describes the adventures of the Carvel family during the years leading up to the American Revolution. This novel also was a huge success.
Winston Churchill followed up this success with his work The Crisis. This book tells the story of Stephen Brice, a Boston lawyer who falls in love with Virginia Carvel, a Confederate soldier's daughter. Virginia decides to marry Clarence Colfax, a like-minded Confederate, but through the dark days of the war, Virginia realizes she truly loves Brice.
Many people considered that Winston's book, The Crossing, was the best book of his works. It relates the tale of David Ritchie, who grows up on the Kentucky frontier. The story includes a war, orphanhood, career forays across the United States, and a sentimental romance.
Despite his fame as a novelist, Winston Churchill turned from the historical stories that so delighted his audience. He increasingly sought a voice in politics rather than literature. His homely morals, which had seemed pleasantly familiar in a narrative of distant times, became the focus of Winston's polemic.
From 1903 to 1905, Winston Churchill held a seat in the New Hampshire legislature. He was a delegate from New Hampshire at the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1904. In 1906 Winston Churchill ran for the New Hampshire governorship but did not win. Also, in 1912 he was a candidate from the Progressive Party, but he lost the election, and he retired from politics.
These experiences gradually found their way into his fiction, notably his tale of political corruption, Coniston. In this novel, Jethro Bass seeks power by depraved politicking. His lady love, Cynthia Ware, snubs him for another, but Bass eventually reconciles with her new family by letting go of his political might. The novel ends with Cynthia's daughter getting married. The old-fashioned tone pleased many critics as well as readers.
Later, Winston Churchill's novels turned from political to religious moralizing. In his book, The Inside of the Cup, he describes Saint John's Church, a once godly place, and now settled by corrupt urbanites.
The book, The Uncharted Way, is an examination, chiefly through the Old Testament prophets and the parables of Jesus, of the roots of religion, individualism, science, human conduct, human hope.
In 1917-1918, after World War I, Winston Churchill served as an editor at Charles Scribner's Sons in New York.
Besides, Winston practiced art. He was known for his landscapes.
Toward the end of Winston Churchill's career, he published less, preferring to consider theological and moral questions rather than writing about glamorous, daring figures. Nevertheless, his early novels, and, to some extent, his later books raised the bar for historical fiction because of Winston's steadfast insistence on thorough research. Though his stories seemed to many critics to have wilted through the years, they are still good examples of historical romances that connect with contemporary tastes.
Winston Churchill involved with the Republican and Progressive political parties.
Views
Quotations:
"It is very difficult now for me to think of myself as a writer of novels, as all that seems to belong to another life."
Membership
Authors League of America
,
United States
Cornish Art Colony
,
United States
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
A reviewer in the Cyclopedia of World Authors: "Winston Churchill is a voice from long ago. He concerned himself, except for his early historical novels, with then-current problems of divorce, religion, and class relationships, but to these problems, he, as a product and endorser of the status quo, had no very compelling answer."
Larry Olpin: "Churchill took particular care to be historically accurate in his novels. He always did his homework, reading the historical material available to him, and carefully checking historical facts. He paid special attention to biographies and used them to benefit his fiction."
Larry Olpin: "Churchill tries to do too much in each novel. His novels are too long and too broad in their scope given his constant repetitions and his penchant for seeing everything through the restricted sense of absolute right and wrong."
Interests
Painting.
Connections
Winston Churchill married Mabel Harlakenden Hall on October 22, 1895. They had three children: Mabel, John, and Creighton.