Winston Churchill is best remembered as one of the most important statesmen of the twentieth century, but he was also an enormously prolific and accomplished literary figure. Over the course of his sixty-year career as a soldier, journalist, and politician, he produced a body of work—from political speeches to histories, war reporting to memoirs to even a novel—staggering in its scope. Churchill was born November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace, in Oxfordshire, England, to a wealthy aristocratic family. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was an important and controversial member of Britain’s Conservative Party; his ancestor was the famous John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, England’s champion during the eighteenth-century wars against Louis XIV of France. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American heiress and socialite, part of New York’s own mid-Atlantic aristocracy. Although Churchill’s ancestry and upbringing as part of England’s governing class forever shaped his career and beliefs, his childhood was an unhappy one. His parents, though he revered them, were too busy for their son: of his youth he wrote that “I would far rather have been apprenticed to a bricklayer’s mate, or run errands as a messenger boy, or helped my father to dress the front windows of a grocer’s shop. It would have been real…Also I should have got to know my father, which would have been a joy to me.” Instead, his “dearest and most intimate friend” was his nanny, Elizabeth Everest.

Churchill was schooled at Harrow, where he performed poorly. His academic deficiency, however, proved a blessing in disguise: “by being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English…Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.” Years of drilling English engendered in Churchill a love of the language that sustained him throughout his life—financially, politically, and during intermittent bouts of depression. “I have sometimes fortified myself amid the vexations, vicissitudes and uncertainties of political life,” he later wrote, “by the reflection that I might find a secure line of retreat on the pleasant, peaceful and fertile country of the pen, where one need never be idle or dull.” This verve shone through in one of the few bright spots of Churchill’s academic career, a poem he wrote at the age of 15 called “The Influenza,” which won a House Prize at Harrow. Though written so early on, it nevertheless reflects the deep-seated faith in British imperialism that characterized Churchill’s later thinking: “God shield our Empire from the might / Of war or famine, plague or blight / And all the power of Hell, / And keep it ever in the hands / Of those who fought ‘gainst other lands, / Who fought and conquered well.”

Churchill’s parents next sent him to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, where he trained for a career in the army. In 1895, when he was 20, he joined the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars regiment. With the help of his well-connected mother, Churchill received a posting to Cuba during its War of Independence—material for his first attempt at journalism, a series of reports for London’s Daily Graphic (a contract also secured by his mother). The next year his regiment transferred to Bangalore, in British India, where Churchill found himself with a surplus of downtime. From England his mother mailed him books, with which he embarked on a program of study designed to fill in the gaps of his Sandhurst education: he read the great English historians Gibbon and Macaulay; the poetry of Arthur Hallam; Darwin’s theory of evolution; and the philosophy of Plato. Ever seeking action, in 1897 Churchill secured himself a place as a war correspondent on Sir Bindon Blood’s expedition against the native Pashtuns on the colony’s northwest frontier. His dispatches, published in The Daily Telegraph, were hugely popular back in England, and in 1898 he published them together as his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force.

On his journey to the frontier, Churchill had also begun work on his only novel, also completed in 1898 but published two years later. Savrola: A Tale of Revolution in Laurania fell in the then-popular genre of the “Ruritanian” romance—extravagant, aristocratic adventure narratives set in fictional European states. The plot follows Lucile, wife of Laurania’s dictator, who falls in love with the revolutionary leader Savrola, with whom Churchill has often been identified. The description of Savrola provides an insight into the young writer’s self-conception: he could “know rest only in action, contentment only in danger, and in confusion find [his] only peace…Ambition was the motive force, and he was powerless to resist it.” The novel received middling reviews; “I have consistently urged my friends,” he later wrote, “to abstain from reading it.”

Churchill next found himself a spot in Herbert Kitchener’s Nile expeditionary force, with which he fought in the Mahdist War in Sudan while reporting for The Morning Post. He participated in the Battle of Omdurman, which acted as the major set-piece in his complete account of the campaign, The River War, published in 1899. Churchill’s reporting from both India and Sudan was characterized by a romantic view of imperial conquest as a kind of grand adventure in which the British, racially Anglo-Saxon protagonists sallied forth to lay low the “heathens” and replace “barbarism” with “civilization.” English newspapers frequently referred to colonial military expeditions as “Romances” or “Dramas,” and narrative war journalism from “special correspondents” was wildly popular among the British public. Churchill embraced this brand, although his reports from Sudan contain a complicating degree of irony. In one dispatch to The Morning Post, written 10 days after the Battle of Omdurman, he wrote that “perhaps the time will come when the supply will be exhausted and there will be no more royal freaks to conquer. In that gloomy period there will be no more of these nice little expeditions…no more medals for the soldiers, no more peerages for the generals, no more copy for the journalists. The good times will have passed away, and the most cynical philosopher will be forced to admit that though the world may not be much more prosperous it can scarcely be so merry.”

In 1899, Churchill left the army, returned to England, and ran for election to Parliament in the Oldham constituency, losing by a slim margin. Later that year, he traveled to South Africa on commission for The Morning Post to report on the impending Second Boer War. Shortly after his arrival, however, he was captured by the Boers and sent to a P.O.W. camp in Pretoria. Within a month he had escaped, fleeing undercover to Portuguese East Africa before rejoining the British army and taking part in the successful siege of Ladysmith. All the while, Churchill mailed reports of his dazzling exploits to The Morning Post; his articles caused a sensation and the tabloids—eager for a positive story in a war going otherwise poorly—championed him to the public as a hero of the empire. He compiled his memoirs of the war in London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton’s March (both published in 1900), and, leveraging his newfound fame and literary proceeds, returned to Oldham for another election cycle. This time Churchill won, and at 25 years old assumed a seat in the House of Commons as a member of the Conservative Party.

Two years later he published Mr Winston Churchill on the Education Bill, the first of over 135 such pamphlets released over the course of his career, which recorded his speeches and responses to questions in Parliament. Churchill the politician was defined by his oratory. Although never comfortable speaking off the cuff, over decades in and out of Parliament he mastered the set speech: in the words of his contemporary Lord Balfour, Churchill carried “heavy but not very mobile guns.” He poured a huge amount of effort and energy into composing his speeches—his WWII secretary John Colville estimated that Churchill put in an hour of work for every minute he spoke. His style was distinguished by short, usually Anglo-Saxon words, often arranged in alliteration; he frequently employed repetition to give his oratory a rhythmic, pulsating quality; and he made ample use of metaphor and simile, calling up bold, stirring imagery often described as Shakespearean. “The climax of oratory,” wrote Churchill, “is reached by a rapid succession of waves of sound and vivid pictures.”

In 1906, Churchill published a two-volume biography of his father, who had died in 1894. Lord Randolph Churchill painted a positive portrait of a man reviled as much as he was admired during a tumultuous political career that ended in his early death, the cause of which many believed was syphilis. Scholars have argued that the biography, like most of Churchill’s writings, also served a political purpose—in this case, to justify his scandalous decision to defect from the Conservative Party in 1904 and join the Liberals. Over the first decade of the twentieth century, Churchill’s prominence and power grew: in 1910 he was made Home Secretary, and the next year he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. In this role, Churchill revitalized and modernized the imperial navy ahead of WWI, but it was also in this capacity that he bore the brunt of the blame for the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign of 1915. Suddenly out of favor and without a place in the newly-formed coalition government, Churchill resigned and traveled to the front, serving in France as a lieutenant colonel in the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers.

Churchill returned to government in 1919 as Minister of War, but four years later the reigning coalition government collapsed and he found himself on the outs again, and suffering from an acute case of appendicitis to boot (“in the blink of an eye I found myself without an office, without a seat, without a party, and even without an appendix”). Churchill used this new availability to begin work on his first major historical project, a six-volume, autobiographical account of WWI that examined its initial causes through to its consequences in the 1920s. T.E. Lawrence called it “far and away the best war-book I’ve yet read,” and John Maynard Keynes offered his praise as well. Churchill’s political contemporaries were more skeptical. One colleague said that “Winston has written an enormous book about himself, and called it The World Crisis,” and Balfour described it as an “autobiography disguised as a history of the universe.” Churchill used The World Crisis to present, among other things, his side of Gallipoli—to justify his decisions, to shift blame away from himself. The result was a subjective account that focused on the aspects of the war Churchill knew best or was eager to emphasize.

In 1930, now in his mid-fifties and once again in government as a Conservative, Churchill published My Early Life, a memoir of his childhood and career up to around 1902. Its ironic descriptions of his school days, army exploits, and fledgling political endeavors exemplify a distinctly Churchillian style, energetic, witty, frank, and, in the vein of the belles-lettres tradition, eminently concerned with crafting the pleasing sentence. George Orwell, reviewing a later work of Churchill’s, described that he had “a real if not very discriminating feel for literature…In general, Churchill’s writings are more like those of a human being than a public figure.”

In 1931, after a number of political missteps, Churchill was forced out of government yet again, and he remained without office until 1939. During these “wilderness years,” as he called them, Churchill turned to writing full-time. His major work of this period was Marlborough: His Life and Times, a lionizing biography that attempted to rehabilitate his ancestor’s reputation, stained by Macaulay’s criticisms in his famous history of England. Like The World Crisis, Marlborough was also a commentary on Churchill’s present. Throughout the thirties, he urged Britain’s statesmen to recognize Hitler as an existential threat to England and the rest of Europe, and was outspoken in his criticism of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement—he called the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which France and Britain ceded the Sudetenland to the Nazis, a “total and unmitigated defeat.” In this context, Churchill presented Marlborough as a defender of English liberty against the tyrant Louis XIV, drawing a conscious parallel with the coming battle against Hitler.

Churchill became Prime Minister in May of 1940, as the Nazis swept through France and towards the English Channel. He later wrote that “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” His worldview was informed by his beliefs as a historian: Churchill is often considered the last prominent proponent of Whig history, a school of thought which flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries but was considered largely obsolete by the time he was writing. Whig thinkers conceived of English history as a unified narrative uncoiling all the way to the present day, in which the steady increase of English popular liberty, manifested in a representative parliament, prevailed over monarchic aggression and continental foes. Churchill also believed in the power of exceptional individuals—that history was determined by leaders like Marlborough, like those profiled in his essay collection Great Contemporaries (1937), and like himself.

Churchill delivered his most famous speeches as the wartime Prime Minister. His oratory, given in the House of Commons and broadcast over the radio to his nation, is often credited as playing a major part in the survival of England, and thus Europe, under the Nazi peril. He commenced his premiership with a famous declaration: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” In the war’s bleak early days, Churchill’s oratory—including his “We shall fight them on the beaches” and “This was their finest hour” speeches—helped to galvanize the British people and shore up their resolution, in spite of seemingly desperate odds. Churchill had always understood the power of his voice: in an essay written when he was only 23, he proclaimed that “of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world.”

Upon the eve of Allied victory in 1945, Churchill was voted out of office. Although widely popular for his wartime leadership, the opposing Labour Party’s policy of economic and social reform better suited the desires of Britain’s postwar electorate. Free of the great responsibility he had held for the previous five years, Churchill immediately began work on his six-volume history of the war. Built around a combination of autobiographical commentary and primary sources—official documents, the minutes of his meetings, his wartime correspondences—The Second World War, like The World Crisis, provided Churchill’s personal perspective on events. He had conceived of the project as soon as he entered office as Prime Minister, and throughout the war he ordered personal copies of various memoranda, documents, and correspondences. “I will leave judgments on this matter to history,” he said, “but I will be one of the historians.” The Second World War was composed, however, with the help of an entire team of writers and researchers hired by Churchill and known as “The Syndicate,” which included an Oxford historian, two generals, and a former naval officer. When asked how much of the history Churchill really wrote, one researcher replied that this was “almost as superficial a question as asking a master chef, ‘Did you cook the whole banquet with your own hands?’” Churchill averaged between six and 12 drafts for each chapter, and habitually pushed his publication deadlines.

The Second World War was an international bestseller and garnered critical praise. Orwell, reviewing its second volume, noted in the pages Churchill’s distinctive presence—“a certain largeness and geniality which comes out even in formal memoirs of this type”—the personality of that “tough and humorous old man whom [the ordinary people] would not accept as a peace-time leader but whom in the moment of disaster they felt to be representative of themselves.” As an objective history, The Second World War is unreliable, but as the only account of the conflict written by one its belligerents’ wartime leaders, it represents a unique resource for the modern scholar. In the words of historian Gordon K. Lewis, “its supreme value…lies in the fact that it is composed by a great statesman who is able to illuminate the problem of crisis and leadership in history from the vast storehouse of his own remarkable career.”

In 1953, Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The judges commended him “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.” Churchill struck a modest tone when accepting the prize, which commemorated his wartime leadership as much as it recognized his literary merits. “I am proud,” he said, “but also, I must admit, awestruck at your decision to include me. I do hope you are right. I feel we are both running a considerable risk and that I do not deserve it. But I shall have no misgivings if you have none.”

Churchill’s last major work was A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in four volumes (1956-1958). He had in fact begun the project in 1932, and had completed the majority of it by 1939; the remainder was finished by scholar-ghostwriters during and after Churchill’s second term as Prime Minister (1951-1955). A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, of all his works, most exemplifies his devotion to the Whiggish conception of history. Churchill gives a unified narrative spanning from the Roman invasion of Britain to the Second Boer War, punctuated by a chain of key moments in which the English defend themselves against continental aggressors. The driving forces of history, in Churchill’s view, were concepts like “national character,” “destiny,” and the greatness of decisive individuals. In his treatment of British imperial history, he conceived of an Anglo-Saxon race destined to conquer and rule, and which, in its subjugation of the world’s “lesser” peoples, had lifted them from darkness and into “civilization.” He presented Americans as the extension of this English race, bringing both nations under the artificial ethno-cultural umbrella of the “English-Speaking Peoples.”

Churchill held such ideas throughout his career, a fact which, in the 21st century, has sparked vigorous debate over his legacy in light of his deeply regressive outlook on race. Over the years, Churchill repeatedly expressed his belief in a racial hierarchy that placed white Anglo-Saxons at the top, and he openly advocated for the violent suppression and supplantation of indigenous peoples by, as he put it in 1937, “a stronger race, a higher grade race.” His political behavior reflected these ideas—in the early thirties he vociferated against the Government of India Bill, which would have granted the colony at least nominal self-governing status; and some scholars have argued that he was a direct contributor to the Bengal famine of 1943, in which millions of Bengalis died from starvation and disease.

Churchill died on January 25, 1965, in London, where he received a state funeral. Among other things, he had been an enthusiastic amateur painter. Unsurprisingly, he wrote a book about it—Painting as a Pastime, published in 1948—while still nursing the sting of his abrupt and unexpected ejection from the premiership. “Authors are the happy people in the world, whose work is pleasure,” he once said. “No one can set himself to the writing of a page of English composition without feeling a real pleasure in the medium in which he works, the flexibility and the profoundness of his noble mother tongue.”