Alan Moorehead
Tom Pocock

Alan Moorehead

Alan Moorehead was lionized as the literary man of action: the most celebrated war correspondent of World War II; author of award-winning books; star travel-writer of "The New Yorker'; pioneer publicist of wildlife conservation. Then, at the height of his success, his writing suddenly stopped and when, 17 years later, his death was announced, he seemed a heroic figure from the past.

With exclusive access to unpublished letters and diaries and after extensive interviews with Moorehead's family and friends, Tom Pocock tells the story of the young Australian whose fame as a writer gave him the friendship of Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw and Field Marshall Montgomery and whose courtship and marriage to the beautiful Lucy Milner is reflected in a remarkable sequence of love letters. In this biography Moorehead appears as a man with a great appetite for experience and the ability to convey it, worthy of the epic times in which he lived.

Book Details:

  • Author: Tom Pocock
  • Published Year: 1989
  • Rights Sold
    • UK: Bodley Head
Tom Pocock

Tom Pocock

Tom Pocock is the author of 18 books (and editor of two more), mostly biographies but including two about his experiences as a newspaper war correspondent.Born in London in 1925 - the son of the novelist and educationist Guy Pocock - he was educated at Westminster School and Cheltenham College, joining the Royal Navy in 1943. He was at sea during the invasion of Normandy and, having suffered from ill-health, returned to civilian life and in 1945 became a war correspondent at the age of 19,the youngest of the Second World War.After four years wth the Hulton Press current affairs magazine gro...
More about Tom Pocock

Book Reviews

  • "Pocock's biography is excellent...it would be difficult to think of a better guide to the life of a Second World War correspondent."
    Sunday Telegraph
  • "This is a model biography."
    Anthony Howard, London Review of Books
  • "A perceptive and fascinating account of an exceptionally talented man."
    Philip Warner, Scotland on Sunday
  • "No one has captured better...the war correspondent's trade."
    Spectator
  • "Pocock's book is as significant for the issues it broaches about war reporting as for its chronicle of Moorehead's life...it is important reading."
    Independent