Shirer, William L.

William L. Shirer, in full William Lawrence Shirer, (born Feb. 23, 1904, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died Dec. 28, 1993, Boston, Mass.), American journalist, historian, and novelist, best known for his massive study The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960).

In the 1920s and ’30s Shirer was stationed in Europe and in India as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the Universal News Service. In addition, he served from 1937 to 1941 as radio broadcaster for the Columbia Broadcasting System, relaying to America news of the European crises leading to World War II. His impassioned statements alerting America to the Nazi danger earned him several journalistic awards.

Shirer collected his impressions of European political events in Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (1941), which gained an international audience for its simple documentation of survival amid horror. In the 1950s Shirer began his research for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which won a National Book Award in 1961. The book is a comprehensive and readable study of the Nazis’ rise to power under Adolf Hitler, the details and excesses of their rule, and their eventual demise. Shirer’s other major historical work is The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (1969). The book is considered by some to be the best one-volume study of France during the period between the world wars. In 1979 Shirer published Gandhi: A Memoir, in which he recalled a series of interviews that he conducted with Mohandas Gandhi while stationed as a foreign correspondent in India during the early 1930s. Shirer’s three-volume set of memoirs is collectively entitled Twentieth-Century Journey (1976, 1984, 1990).