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Mr. de Gramont raced to the scene, a number of blocks away, after which sprinted again to his typewriter. His deadline was lower than an hour away. “There was an superior second because the singer fell,” he wrote. “The remainder of the solid remained paralyzed. Lastly somebody within the capability viewers known as out ‘For God’s sake, ring down the curtain.’”
For his “transferring account” of Warren’s demise, Mr. de Gramont gained the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Native Reporting — Version Time, a class now known as Breaking Information. The article propelled the profession of the younger reporter, who grew to become a overseas correspondent dispatched to France, Congo and Vietnam earlier than he launched into a prolific profession as an writer.
He customary a brand new title, Ted Morgan, an anagram of de Gramont that he selected over Tom Hazard, Rod Magnet and Dr. Montage. Ted Morgan, he as soon as famous, sounded “forthright and sensible, incisive and balanced.” And he was uninterested in seeing his byline misspelled.
Mr. Morgan, who drew approval for biographies of writer W. Somerset Maugham and statesman Winston Churchill and mined his personal outstanding life story in three vivid memoirs, died Dec. 13 at a nursing house in Manhattan. He was 91.
He had dementia, stated his spouse, Eileen Bresnahan Morgan.
Possessed of intense curiosity, Mr. Morgan wrote his books as if he nonetheless confronted a newspaperman’s each day deadlines, producing 25 volumes in 50 years. His subjects had been as assorted because the Niger River in Africa, the rise of McCarthyism in America, the historical past of espionage, the settling of North America, the making of the American West, the trial of former Nazi Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in France, and the 1954 French navy defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam.
His 1980 biography “Maugham” was a finalist for a Nationwide Guide Award, and his 1982 Churchill e book, “Churchill: Younger Man in a Hurry, 1874-1915,” was a Pulitzer finalist.
Mr. Morgan additionally wrote well-regarded biographies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Beat novelist William S. Burroughs; two novels; and three books about his life, “On Changing into American” (1978), “Rowing Towards Eden” (1981) and “My Battle of Algiers” (2005).
His old-world household was so fossilized, he wrote within the first memoir, that after a lunch with Marcel Proust, his father handed the novelist a visitor e book “and with the full disdain of the nobleman for the artist, stated, ‘Simply your title, Mr. Proust. No ideas.’”
Mr. Morgan renounced his aristocratic title in 1977 when he grew to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
He was born in Geneva on March 31, 1932, as Le Comte Sanche Armand Gabriel de Gramont, a scion of the Aristocracy from the Decrease Navarre area of France. His household title, de Gramont, dated “to the morning of civilization,” he wrote, and his bewigged ancestors attended emperors and kings. His first title, Sanche, was a contraction of St. Charles.
He grew up shuttling between France and the USA. His father was posted to Washington because the French air attaché in 1937 however returned to France two years later when battle broke out in Europe, leaving his spouse and three sons in Washington. He died in a aircraft crash in England in 1943.
The younger rely was despatched to dwell with a rich aunt and uncle in New York, the place he attended the French lycée. At his mom’s insistence, he tried a 12 months on the Sorbonne in Paris, however he yearned for the much less stuffy surroundings of America. A household good friend organized for him to fulfill the president of Yale, A. Whitney Griswold, who invited him to finish his diploma there.
He graduated in 1954 and, after a summer season writing movie gossip for the Hollywood Reporter, acquired a grasp’s diploma the subsequent 12 months from Columbia College’s journalism college.
He was drawn to journalism, he wrote in his 2005 memoir, as a result of he had “an aversion to causes, nonetheless noble. I instinctively sought to stay uninvolved, an observer fairly than a participant.” Additionally, he stated, he appreciated “to snoop.”
After a short stint on the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram, he was conscripted into the French military in 1956 and entered officers’ coaching college in an effort to keep away from obligation in French-ruled Algeria, the place he opposed efforts to place down an insurgency. His bid backfired when he was posted as a second lieutenant to a fight outpost south of Algiers, the capital.
He was ambushed and practically killed on his first official mission: main colonial troops from Senegal on their month-to-month go to to an army-approved brothel.
In a protracted battle that noticed atrocities on each side, French troopers routinely tortured or killed Algerian captives, whereas insurgents planted lethal bombs in theaters and eating places well-liked with French civilians.
A commander thus shrugged when Mr. Morgan entered into what he known as an “altered state” and beat a prisoner to demise throughout an interrogation. The person’s wrists had been tied over a beam in order that his ft didn’t contact the bottom.
“I used to be horrified by what I did,” Mr. Morgan wrote 50 years later in “My Battle of Algiers.” “I had killed a defenseless man.” The episode left “a type of inside disfigurement that I’ve needed to dwell with.”
A household good friend helped him get reassigned to a navy newspaper in Algiers, and he was by no means charged with killing the unarmed prisoner or, later, serving to a French navy deserter flee the nation. The French in the end misplaced the battle and withdrew in 1962.
After his navy service, Mr. Morgan spent a 12 months with the Related Press in New York earlier than becoming a member of the now-defunct Herald Tribune in 1959, the place he labored alongside Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Charles Portis and different soon-to-be literary lions.
The Pulitzer win propelled his profession, and he was despatched to Paris as a overseas correspondent. He was reporting in Congo in December 1961 when U.N. troops from Sweden mistakenly fired a bazooka at his automotive, killing one of many occupants. He recalled his good friend, writer and journalist David Halberstam, telling him, “What do you count on from Swedes? They haven’t fought a battle in 200 years.”
Badly wounded, Mr. Morgan was evacuated to a hospital in London however quickly was reporting on the rising U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
He was a contract author in 1967 when he completely misplaced his listening to in a single ear overlaying a French political marketing campaign in subzero temperatures. “Each career has its occupational hazards, and I caught otitis … stumping within the mountains,” he later wrote.
Though some critics of Mr. Morgan’s well-liked histories famous his tendency, at occasions, to not let the information get in the way in which of a superb story, his work ethic was by no means in query. Maugham, who died in 1965, had laid out in his will that nobody must be given entry to his letters or papers for a biography, and Mr. Morgan was warned he would get no cooperation from Maugham’s property or household in England.
Mr. Morgan was undeterred. He interviewed dozens of Maugham’s pals and associates and did analysis in 20 libraries from California to England, in the end uncovering 5,000 letters.
When Maugham’s agent and executor, Spencer Curtis Brown, learn Mr. Morgan’s first draft, he determined to disregard his shopper’s final needs and granted entry to the sequestered materials to make sure the biography can be correct and full. Maugham’s household quickly invited the writer to go to.
A Washington Publish reviewer, journalist Michael Kernan, praised “a masterful job of reportage” that exposed Maugham as “an advanced man who went out of his technique to distort, conceal, and intentionally lie in regards to the information of his life.”
Mr. Morgan’s marriages to socialite Margaret Chanler Emmet Kinnicutt and poet Nancy Ryan led to divorce. In 1985, he married photographer Eileen Bresnahan.
Moreover his spouse, of Manhattan, survivors embody two kids from his second marriage, Gabriel Morgan of Taos, N.M., and Amber de Gramont of Lakeville, Conn., and 4 grandchildren.
Mr. Morgan instructed C-SPAN interviewer Brian Lamb in 2010 that his peripatetic journalistic and literary profession was a deliberate riposte to an upbringing he discovered uncomfortably predetermined.
“The thought in my time was I ought to marry a wealthy lady and dwell off my land,” he stated. “We had a fortress outdoors Paris. However … I’d spent an excessive amount of time in the USA for that type of life.”
