On this day 46 years ago, Sir Winston Churchill died at the age of 90, seventy years to the day after the death of his father Lord Randolph Churchill. Best known for leading the United Kingdom through the dark days of the Second World War, Churchill was also an army officer, writer, historian and artist. In 1953 the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Winston Churchill “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”.
Churchill first took up writing to supplement his income as an army officer, as he was constantly unable to live within his means. His first major work was The Story of the Malakand Field Force, published in 1898, describing a military campaign on the Northwest Frontier (now Pakistan). This was followed in 1899 by The River War, describing a war in Sudan. His only novel, Savrola, describing a revolution in a fictional country, was published in serial form in 1899.
Churchill subsequently published a biography of his father, a history of the First World War entitled The World Crisis, an account of his own upbringing, My Early Life, and a biography of the Duke of Marlborough. After the Second World War, a six volume set of his memoirs of the war was published, and then a four-volume history of Britain from the Roman invasion until the First World War, entitled A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.