Shirer, William L

Shirer, William L(awrence)

(born Feb. 23, 1904, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died Dec. 28, 1993, Boston, Mass.) U.S. journalist, historian, and novelist. He served as a foreign correspondent and radio broadcaster in Europe and India in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. Berlin Diary (1941) collects his impressions of European political events. He was blacklisted in the McCarthy era as a leftist sympathizer. He is best known for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1969, National Book Award), a massive study of Nazi Germany. His other major historical work is The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), a study of France. Gandhi (1979) recalls interviews conducted in the 1930s.