Liberation Trilogy, An Army At Dawn, American Revolution, Day of Battle - Author Interview (2013)

• published: 08 Jan 2015
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Rick Atkinson (born Lawrence Rush Atkinson IV, on November 16, 1952 in Munich) is an American author who has won Pulitzer Prizes in history and journalism. After working as a newspaper reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Atkinson turned to writing military history. His six books include narrative accounts of four different American wars. His Liberation Trilogy, a history of the American role in the liberation of Europe in World War II, concluded with the publication of The Guns at Last Light in May 2013. In 2010, he received the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. Atkinson's first book, written while on leave from the Post, was The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966. A 1989 review in Time magazine called it “brilliant history,” [3] and Business Week reviewer Dave Griffiths called it "the best book out of Vietnam to date."[1] author James Salter, reviewing the book for The Washington Post Book World, wrote, “Enormously rich in detail and written with a novelist's brilliance, the pages literally hurry before one.” In 1993, Atkinson wrote Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. In a review, The Wall Street Journal wrote, “No one could have been better prepared to write a book on Desert Storm, and Atkinson's Crusade does full justice to the opportunity." Publication of the Liberation Trilogy began in 2002 with An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943, acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as “the best World War II battle narrative since Cornelius Ryan’s classics, The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far.” While with the 101st Airborne Division south of Baghdad in April 2003, Atkinson learned that the book had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history. The trilogy's second volume, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944, published in 2007, drew praise from the New York Times as “a triumph of narrative history, elegantly written...and rooted in the sight and sounds of battle.” Volume three, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945, was published by Henry Holt and Co. in May 2013, and was ranked #1 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction[4] and Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction[5][6] bestseller lists. A review in the New York Times called the book "a tapestry of fabulous richness and complexity...Atkinson is a master of what might be called 'pointillism history,' assembling the small dots of pure color into a vivid, tumbling narrative...The Liberation Trilogy is a monument achievement." As a result of his time with Gen. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne, Atkinson also wrote In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat, which The New York Times Book Review called “intimate, vivid, and well-informed,” and which Newsweek cited as one of the ten best books of 2004. Atkinson was the lead essayist in Where Valor Rests: Arlington National Cemetery, published by the National Geographic Society in 2007. In 2013 Mr. Atkinson was working on a trilogy about the American Revolution 1775-1781, to be edited by John Sterling. Bibliography The Long Gray Line. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1989. ISBN 0-395-48008-6. Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1993. ISBN 0-3957-1083-9. An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943. New York: Henry Holt. 2002. ISBN 0-8050-6288-2. In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat. New York: Henry Holt. 2004. ISBN 0-8050-7561-5. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944. New York: Henry Holt. 2007. ISBN 0-8050-6289-0. "Where Valor Rests: Arlington National Cemetery, National Geographic". National Geographic (Washington, DC). 2007. The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945. New York: Henry Holt. 2013. ISBN 0-8050-6290-4. D-Day: The Invasion of Normandy, 1944. New York: Henry Holt. 2014. ISBN 9781627791113. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Atkinson