William Shirer
In 1960 William L. Shirer published the first definitive history of Nazi germany in English. The book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, was a huge best-seller and won the National Book Award. It became a classic and is still in print and still resonates powerfully as an introduction to the seduction of Germany by Hitler & the Nazis. I read the book and it started me on a lifelong study of Germany that persists to this day. Shirer started out in Paris after graduating from Coe College in Iowa. He, like Hemingway, wanted to be a novelist but instead found his true calling as a journalist & historian and reported about the developments in Germany for most of the 1930s & early 1940s. He and Edward R. Murrow became noted pioneers in radio coverage of European developments. Shirer went on to write nearly twenty books in his career but none enjoyed the success of The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich.