Shirer, William L ___ 1904-1993 ___ American ___ writer

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
William Shirer was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His father, a lawyer, died when he was still a child, and - so the story goes - he had to deliver newspapers and sell eggs to help the family make ends meet. He graduated with an arts degree, joined the army briefly, and also worked on a local newspaper. When only 21, Shirer went to Europe and, settling in Paris, found work on the local copy desk for the Chicago Tribune, before flowering into a fully fledged foreign correspondent. Among his assignments were the Amsterdam Olympics, a meeting with Gandhi in India, and Nadir Khan’s crowning in Afghanistan. In 1931, he married a Viennese photographer, Theresa Stiberitz. The following year, he lost one eye in a skiing accident. Thereafter, he left his job and, with his wife, lived in Spain in the house of the guitarist Andrés Segovia for a while. In 1934, the couple moved to Berlin (one of his first assignments was to cover the annual Nazi party rally), where Shirer worked for Universal News Service until it folded in 1937. He was then taken on by Edward Murrow, European manager for Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and thus became the first of a group that would be called ‘Murrow’s Boys’ - groundbreaking broadcast journalists reporting on the war and its aftermath. He stayed in Berlin until 1940, when he returned to the US. Thereafter, he undertook a long lecture tour, served as a technical advisor for a Hollywood film, and edited his journal for publication as ‘Berlin Diary’, which became a bestseller. After the war, Shirer returned to Germany for a while to cover the Nuremberg Trials. He contributed regularly to a number of magazines, and, in 1947, published his sequel ‘End of a Berlin Diary’. His experiences in Europe, and his interest in the war, led him to become an expert in Nazi history, about which he wrote extensively. In 1960, he won the (US) National Book Award for ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’.
A biography link
Wikipedia bio
The Diary Review - The Reichstag on fire

DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1934-1945 ___ domestic travel historyeye Germany Nazism

WEB TEXT LINKS
a bit about
a few pages
etext

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS

SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
Berlin Diary
End of a Berlin Diary

May 2005, August 2008, April 2013
Please email if you have any corrections, additions or comments, or if you've found the site useful. Thank you.

IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS: 1) The first line of basic information may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown, or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British' a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies. 4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges, and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising. I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries.