W. A. Swanberg

William Andrew Swanberg, (1907–1992), pen-name W.A. Swanberg, was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning American biographer. He is perhaps best known for Citizen Hearst, his biography of William Randolph Hearst. He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1907 and earned his B.A. at the University of Minnesota in 1930. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1960. He died of heart failure in Southbury, Connecticut in 1992.

With grudging and only partial help from his father (who wanted his son to be a cabinet maker like himself), Swanberg obtained his degree only to find that employment as a journalist with the local dailies, the St. Paul Daily News or the Minneapolis Star, was not to be. Staffs at those papers were shrinking, not expanding and the new graduate instead was lucky to find a succession of low-paying manual labor jobs. After five years of this he followed a college friend of his to New York City in September 1935. After months of anxious searching for a job his luck turned when he got an interview at the Dell Publishing Company with George T. Delacorte Jr. himself and was hired as an assistant editor of three low brow magazines. Money saved in the next months enabled him to return briefly to the mid-West to marry his college sweetheart, Dorothy Green, and bring her to New York. He soon began to climb up the editorial ladder at Dell. By 1939 he was doing well enough to buy a house in Connecticut and commute by rail to his office in the City.

When war came he was 34 years old with two children and a hearing disability. Rejected by the army, he enlisted in the Office of War Information in 1943 and after training was sent to England shortly after the D-Day invasion. There in London in the midst of the V-1 and V-2 attacks he prepared and edited pamphlets to be air-dropped behind enemy lines in France and later in Norway. With the end of the war he returned in October 1945 to Dell and the publishing world.

He did not return to magazine editing but instead did freelance work within and without Dell. By 1953 he began carving out time for researching his first book (Sickles) which was bought by Scribner’s beginning a long-term association. His early dream of newspaper work never became reality, but by the mid-1950s he had found his métier, namely as a professional, scholarly biographer. But such biographies were labor intensive and took up to four years each even with the researching and transcribing help of his wife Dorothy. When he turned 80 in 1987 he figured he had done his last biography but old habits were hard to break and he got the itch to do just one more, this time on William Eugene “Pussyfoot” Johnson (1862–1945). He was hard at work on that project when he succumbed at his typewriter on September 17, 1992. His papers are archived at Columbia University.

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about William Andre. Swanberg, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 30+ works in 100+ publications in 5 languages and 16,000+ library holdings.

• Sickles the Incredible, 1956
• First Blood: The Story of Ft. Sumter, 1957
• Jim Fisk: The Career of an Improbable Rascal, 1959
• Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst, 1961
• Dreiser, 1965
• Pulitzer, 1967
• The Rector and the Rogue, 1969
• Luce and His Empire, 1972
• Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist, 1976
• Whitney Father, Whitney Heiress, 1980

Literary Awards

• Christopher Award and Minnesota Centennial Award for First Blood
• Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Award, 1961, for Citizen Hearst
• In 1962 the Pulitzer board awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography to Citizen Hearst. The trustees of Columbia University, who administer the prize, overturned the award refusing to honor a book whose subject (William Randolph Hearst) cannot be regarded as an "eminent example of the biographer's art as specified in the prize definition."
• Van Wyck Brooks Award for nonfiction, 1967
• Pulitzer Prize, 1973, for Luce and His Empire
• National Book Award for biography, 1977, for Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist