Ted Morgan

Ted Morgan, writer, biographer, journalist, and historian, born Le Comte Sanche Armand Gabriel de Gramont on March 30, 1932, in Geneva, the son of Gabriel Antoine Armand, Comte de Gramont (1908-1943), a hero of the French Resistance.

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After his father's death in a training flight, Morgan began to lead two lives: on the one hand, attending Yale and working as a reporter in Newark and New York, and on the other, still a member (albeit a reluctant one) of the French nobility and serving in the French Army as a second lieutenant and propaganda officer in the Algerian War of Independence.

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In 1961, as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and still writing as "Sanche de Gramont," he won the Pulitzer Prize in the category of Local Reporting (Edition Time) for what was described as "his moving account of the death of Leonard Warren on the Metropolitan Opera stage," thereby becoming the only French citizen at the time to have ever have won this prize. The singer Leonard Warren had died of a massive cerebral vascular hemorrhage during a performance of La Forza del Destino.

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In 1969, he began using the pseudonym "Ted Morgan," an anagram of "De Gramont." In an attempt to discard his aristocratic, European past, he had settled on a "name that conformed with the language and cultural norms of American society, a name that telephone operators and desk clerks could hear without flinching" (On Becoming American, 1978). In that year, he was featured in the CBS news program 60 Minutes, which explored his reasons for embracing American culture and showed him eating dinner with his family in a fast food restaurant. As "Ted Morgan," he was naturalized as an American citizen in 1977 (at which time he also renounced his titles of nobility), and has written biographies of Winston Churchill, William S. Burroughs, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt under this name. He was named a 1982 National Book Award Finalist for his biography Maugham.

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March 30: March 30 is the 89th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (90th in Leap years). There are 276 days remaining....

1932: 1932 is a leap year starting on a Friday....

Geneva: Geneva (French: Gen?ve) is the second-most populous city in Switzerland located where Lake Geneva (French: Lac L?man, but the Genevois and Genevoise are fond of calling it Lac de Gen?ve) empties into the Rh?ne River. It is the capital of the Canton of Geneva. The population of the city is 185,526 (2...

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