Reporter

The Reporter Who Time Forgot by Michael Shapiro in the Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2010. The article recounts the writing career of Cornelius Ryan, most famous for his two World War II books, The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far.

Ryan was not a children's author but a writer somewhat in the mould of Walter Lord - a meticulous researcher with a gift for bringing historical moments alive. These two are excellent books for young adults, fifteen and up. Compelling narrative describing events that become even more incredible as they recede from us in time.

From the article:

Ryan was fifty-four when he died in November 1974, survived by his wife, son, and daughter. The material he had gathered in twenty years of reporting about the war went to Ohio University in Athens, where the dean of the College of Communications was an old friend. The collection's curator, Doug McCabe, told me that even now, sixty-six years after D-Day, historians from around the world, as well as the children and grandchildren of men who fought that day, stop by to search through Ryan's papers in the archive center of the library. It is, he said, the most heavily used collection in the center.