Winston Churchill Biography

American novelist, born in St Louis, Missouri, educated at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland. Churchill's first novel, The Celebrity: An Episode (1898), was a satire on New York politics and journalism. Richard Carvel (1899), set during the American Revolution, brought Churchill fame and established his métier for romantic fiction with a historical setting in the American past. The Crisis (1901) concerns St Louis at the time of the Civil War, while The Crossing (1904) has affinities with the ‘Leatherstocking’ novels of James Fenimore Cooper with its background of the American frontier towards the close of the eighteenth century. Coniston (1906), Mr. Crewe's Career (1908), and A Far Country (1915) are explorations of the political and economic climate of pre-war America. Churchill, a friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, was the Progressive Party candidate for the governorship of New Hampshire in 1912. His late works, notably The Uncharted Way (1940), are mainly essays in Christian doctrine. Novelist to a Generation: The Life and Thought of Winston Churchill (1976) is a study by Robert W. Schneider.