Walter Duranty

Background

Walter Duranty was born in Liverpool, England, on May 25, 1884. His parents, William Steel and Emmeline (Hutchins) Duranty, were well-to-do suburban folk who apparently raised their son in a state of ease.

Education

Walter was educated at Harrow and Bedford, then at Emmanuel College at Cambridge University. After graduating from Cambridge in 1906 with a degree in classics, Duranty drifted around in America and France, doing little but daydreaming.

Career

Duranty got his start in journalism in 1913, while he was sojourning in Paris: after landing one lucky article with the New York Times Paris bureau chief, Wythe Williams, Duranty plagued Williams until the man finally trained him as a reporter. Since he worked in the Paris bureau, he became valuable to the newspaper at the start of World War I, when he was able to offer first-person accounts of the days' events. His prose was dramatic, even purpled at times; but Duranty managed to hold readers' attention.

Duranty was sent to the important outpost of Riga, Latvia, in 1919, after Russia signed the treaty ending her involvement in World War I. From this point forward, Duranty was the primary authority on Russian politics; he not only reported first-hand on the uprisings that made history in the coming years, but he also offered judgment and analysis that brought Russia's issues home to the American people. Duranty became indispensable to the Times, and to America.

The Curious Lottery (1929), a collection of Duranty's 1920s-era reports on the justice of the Russian courts, was the first book-length collection of Duranty's writing; his dramatic rendering of events and his disinterested approach to his stories won him great regard at home. In 1929 Duranty won the O. Henry Short Story Award for "The Parrot" - a tale he had composed along with his friend H. R. Knickerbocker. Duranty never informed the committee of the coauthorship, and instead took total credit for the story. He seemed to have regretted his decision later, however, and Knickerbocker remained a close friend until his death.

Duranty's later collections of news stories were similarly well-received. In 1932, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the economic situation in the USSR. There were, of course, some who begrudged him this success. But others were certain of his merit.

Similarly, Duranty's reminiscences about his years as a reporter, / Write as I Please (1935) was a critical and monetary success. For all of his merit as an "observer,'' however, Duranty never quite got the acclaim as a stylist and writer that he seems to have wanted. Critics tended to find his work worthy if it recorded his observations as man-on-the-scene, but they expressed less interest in his analysis of events or in his literary abilities. His attempts at fiction were generally brushed off.

Even Duranty's attempts to analyze the political situation with which he was so deeply engaged seemed to annoy critics. Duranty's next work of political analysis, USSR: The Story of Soviet Russia (1944), was greeted only with middling warmth.

During these later years, as Duranty became less and less current in his information, he grew to depend more and more on his abilities as a political analyst and writer - abilities that were secondary to his skills as an observer. His dramatic, full-blown style, moreover, had gone out of fashion. Even when Duranty wanted to return to his old reporting, newspapers would not have him; he had fallen out of favor. He died in Florida on October 3, 1957.

Achievements

• Duranty was an important writer, but he was primarily gifted in his unique position and the materials that his position afforded him. Nevertheless, he shaped America's perception of Soviet Russia simply by virtue of being in the right place at the right time. For this reason, Duranty became a major force in journalism and in United States perceptions of international politics.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Story of the Lafayette Escadrille

    (The Lafayette Escadrille was a legendary fighter squadron...)

  • One Life, One Kopeck
  • The Kremlin and the people
  • Babies Without Tails
  • On Life One Kopeck
  • Europe: War or Peace? World Affairs Pamphlets No. 7
  • U.S.S.R: The Story of Soviet Russia
  • The Curious Lottery And Other Tales Of Russian Justice
  • Duranty Reports Russia
  • Solomans Cat
  • I write as I please
  • USSR, the Story of Soviet Russia

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• The reviewer for the New York Times nodded: "Mr. Duranty has a flair for starkly realistic writing, for reproducing the scene, for imparting life to the actors. Moreover, he has an abounding appreciation of the humorous. On the other hand, the author of The Curious Lottery is not unmoved when the truly pathetic, the genuinely tragic, enters. The human judgment, not formulated, but ever-present in the book, is tolerant and balanced."

Connections

Duranty married Anna Enwright, on October 3, 1957.

Father:

William Steel Duranty

Mother:

Emmeline (Hutchins) Duranty

Spouse:

Anna Enwright

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields: 178
• Stalin's Apologist Short, unattractive, hobbling about Stalin's Moscow on a wooden leg, Walter Duranty was an unlikely candidate for the world's most famous foreign correspondent. Yet for almost twenty years his articles filled the front page of The New York Times with gripping coverage of the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. A witty, engaging, impish character with a flamboyant life-style, he was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the individual most credited with helping to win U.S. recognition for the Soviet regime, and the reporter who had predicted the success of the Bolshevik state when all others claimed it was doomed. But, as S.J. Taylor reveals in this provocative biography, Walter Duranty played a key role in perpetrating some of the greatest lies history has ever known.
• Not Worthy: Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize and the New York Times