Ted Morgan

Ted Morgan (born March 30, 1932) is a French–American biographer, journalist, and historian.

Life

Morgan was born Count Sanche Charles Armand Gabriel de Gramont in Geneva.

He is the son of Gabriel Antoine Armand, Count de Gramont (1908–1943), a pilot in the French escadrille in England during World War II. Gramont is an old French noble family.

After his father's death in a training flight, Morgan began to lead two parallel lives. He attended Yale University (where he was a member of Manuscript Society) and worked as a reporter. But he was still a member (albeit a reluctant one) of the French nobility. He was drafted into the French Army where he served for two years from 1955 to 1957, during the Algerian War, initially as a second lieutenant with a Senegalese regiment of Colonial Infantry and then as a propaganda officer. He subsequently wrote in frank detail of his brutalizing experiences while on active service in the bled (Algerian countryside) and of the atrocities committed by both sides during the Battle of Algiers.

Following his military service, Morgan returned to the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, Edition Time in 1961 for what was described as "his moving account of the death of Leonard Warren on the Metropolitan Opera stage." At the time, Morgan was still a French citizen writing under the name of "Sanche de Gramont".

In the 1970s, Morgan stopped using the byline "Sanche de Gramont". He became an American citizen in 1977, renouncing his titles of nobility. The name he adopted as a U.S. citizen, "Ted Morgan", is an anagram of "de Gramont". The new name was a conscious attempt to discard his aristocratic French 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). Morgan was featured in the CBS news program 60 Minutes in 1978. The segment explored Morgan's reasons for embracing American culture and showed him eating dinner with his family in a fast food restaurant.

Morgan has written biographies of William S. Burroughs, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The last-named was a finalist in the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His 1980 biography of W. Somerset Maugham was a 1982 National Book Award finalist in its first paperback edition. He has also written for newspapers and magazines.

Selected books

• Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War. Random House Publishing Group. 2010. ISBN 9781400066643.
• My Battle of Algiers. HarperCollins. 2006. ISBN 9780060852245.
• A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist and Spymaster. Random House. 1999. ISBN 9780679444008.; Random House Digital, Inc., 2011, ISBN 9780307805669
• Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth Century America. Random House Digital, Inc. 2004. ISBN 9780812973020. Ted Morgan.
• A Shovel of Stars: The Making of the American West 1800 to the Present. Simon & Schuster, 1996. 1995. p. 563. ISBN 9780684814926. Ted Morgan.
• Wilderness at Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent Simon & Schuster, 1993, ISBN 9780671690885
• An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Barbie Trial, and the City of Lyon, 1940–1945 (1990)
• Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. W. W. Norton & Company. 2012 [1988]. ISBN 9780393343243.
• FDR: A Biography, Simon & Schuster, 1985, ISBN 9780671454951
• Churchill: A Young Man in A Hurry, Simon & Schuster, 1982; Simon & Schuster, 1984, ISBN 9780671253042
• Rowing toward Eden, Houghton Mifflin, 1981, ISBN 9780395297148
• Maugham Simon & Schuster, 1980, ISBN 9780671240776
• On Becoming American Houghton Mifflin, 1978
• The Strong Brown God: The Story of the Niger River, Hart Davis, MacGibbon, 1975 (as Sanche de Gramont)
• Lives To Give (1971) (as Sanche de Gramont)
• Epitaph for kings Putnam, 1968 (as Sanche de Gramont)
• The French: Portrait of a people (1969) (as Sanche de Gramont)
• The Secret War: The story of international espionage since 1945 (1962) (as Sanche de Gramont)