Politics & Government
![Deborah Cohen - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B008HDHCF8.jpg)
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War
A prize-winning historian's revelatory account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism
"As intimate and gripping as a novel, this brilliant book vividly conveys what it felt like to live through the shocking crises of the thirties and forties."-Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning
They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night.
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between.
Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther's Death Be Not Proud-a memoir about his son's death from cancer-but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean's Dorothy and Red, about Thompson's fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis.
Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.
"As intimate and gripping as a novel, this brilliant book vividly conveys what it felt like to live through the shocking crises of the thirties and forties."-Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning
They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night.
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between.
Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther's Death Be Not Proud-a memoir about his son's death from cancer-but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean's Dorothy and Red, about Thompson's fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis.
Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.
Editorial Reviews
"The celebrated journalists of the lost generation were voracious, reckless, promiscuous, funny, and drunk, and they were also shrewd and deeply political. They raced toward disaster, interviewing the villainous and those they hoped would be heroes."-Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning
"In this sterling book, Deborah Cohen follows a remarkable group of now mostly forgotten reporters as they try to make sense of a world turned upside down. The result is a shrewd and vivid work of history, one that combines deep research with lustrous narrative verve."-Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Embers of War and JFK
"A fresh, fast-paced history of the twentieth-century's most defining events through the eyes of the foreign correspondents who dashed off to cover them . . . a riveting narrative that unites public and private affairs with rare fluency and power."-Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch
"A whip-smart, propulsive book about the globe-trotting (and bed-hopping) journalists who brought foreign affairs alive. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is a triumph."-Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire
"A kaleidoscopic epic . . . a timely and often uncanny mirror for our present moment of national reckoning."-Deborah Baker, author of The Last Englishmen
"It is both bracing and oddly comforting to read Deborah Cohen's luminous account of a group of writers who faced their own challenging times with courage, wit, and portable typewriters. We have much to learn from this brilliant reclamation of their commitments and their lives."-Susan Pedersen, author of The Guardians
"Brilliantly conceived, beautifully written, this is a daring new history of the world between the wars. Cohen's revelatory book shows how, in the age of extremes, the lines blurred between the personal and the political, biography and history. The work of a truly original historian . . . unforgettable."-Adam Tooze, author of Crashed and Shutdown
"Scintillating . . . Reads like an Alan Furst novel, full of close calls and intrigue . . . [Cohen] convincingly argues, too, that journalism was the true literature of the interwar period, shaped by outsiders from small towns who wanted to better understand the world. An exceptional book of cultural history that makes one long for the days of teletype, booze, spies, and scoops."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In her engrossing account of this era and the people who did more than simply report facts, Cohen successfully interweaves international events with personal histories, creating a narrative that is well-crafted and c...
"In this sterling book, Deborah Cohen follows a remarkable group of now mostly forgotten reporters as they try to make sense of a world turned upside down. The result is a shrewd and vivid work of history, one that combines deep research with lustrous narrative verve."-Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Embers of War and JFK
"A fresh, fast-paced history of the twentieth-century's most defining events through the eyes of the foreign correspondents who dashed off to cover them . . . a riveting narrative that unites public and private affairs with rare fluency and power."-Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch
"A whip-smart, propulsive book about the globe-trotting (and bed-hopping) journalists who brought foreign affairs alive. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is a triumph."-Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire
"A kaleidoscopic epic . . . a timely and often uncanny mirror for our present moment of national reckoning."-Deborah Baker, author of The Last Englishmen
"It is both bracing and oddly comforting to read Deborah Cohen's luminous account of a group of writers who faced their own challenging times with courage, wit, and portable typewriters. We have much to learn from this brilliant reclamation of their commitments and their lives."-Susan Pedersen, author of The Guardians
"Brilliantly conceived, beautifully written, this is a daring new history of the world between the wars. Cohen's revelatory book shows how, in the age of extremes, the lines blurred between the personal and the political, biography and history. The work of a truly original historian . . . unforgettable."-Adam Tooze, author of Crashed and Shutdown
"Scintillating . . . Reads like an Alan Furst novel, full of close calls and intrigue . . . [Cohen] convincingly argues, too, that journalism was the true literature of the interwar period, shaped by outsiders from small towns who wanted to better understand the world. An exceptional book of cultural history that makes one long for the days of teletype, booze, spies, and scoops."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In her engrossing account of this era and the people who did more than simply report facts, Cohen successfully interweaves international events with personal histories, creating a narrative that is well-crafted and c...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter One
Why Not Go?
A "Young-Man-Going-Somewhere" was the way the old-timers at the Chicago Daily News described overeager cub reporters like John Gunther. In 1924, a couple of years out of the University of Chicago, John was dashing between bank robberies, fires, gangster shoot-outs, and Rotary club luncheons. Those were the sorts of stories the lowest guy on the totem pole got assigned at the city's main afternoon paper, but John had already set his sights much higher: he wanted a job at the Daily News's bureau in London. He was fed up with America, its hypocrisy, philistinism, and cant: the Prohibition that didn't really prohibit, the moral regeneration spearheaded by charlatans like the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, the corruption and graft bubbling up under the veneer of postwar "normalcy."
But the postwar disillusionment that had settled over much of American youth was only part of what was ailing John. For more than two years-two fruitless, unavailing years-he'd been trailing around after Helen Hahn, a local belle. He made small talk with her father, ate dinners with her family, sent her letters and books when he was away. John was constant but Helen, a blond stunner, was fickle. Mostly she liked to string him along, touching his arm while they talked, her big blue eyes gazing into his. He'd paid for one of her abortions though the kid definitely wasn't his, which even at the time struck him as the sort of thing only a chump would do. He knew he had to flee.
The arrival of the British writer Rebecca West in Chicago in November 1923 was a beacon from the sophisticated Old World beckoning to the New. West was Britain's most notorious modern woman, a novelist, journalist, and feminist who had just wrenched herself free from an affair with the writer H. G. Wells, immensely famous, twenty-six years her senior, and married.
When John and Rebecca met one evening at the University of Chicago, she was a well-seasoned thirty; he a decidedly tender twenty-two. She was on her first American lecture tour, addressing audiences on such racy subjects as polygamy. There wasn't a man living who could gratify four or five women, Rebecca had insisted: "There are many men who cannot make even one woman happy."
For years Rebecca had been eager to see America, but when she arrived in New York she wasn't all that impressed. "This whole place strikes me as a greedy children's party," she wrote her sister, appalled by the relentless getting and spending. Chicago was different. In its swagger and newness, it wasn't like any place she had ever seen. From her room at the Drake Hotel, she marveled at the never-ending lake, its gray-green wintry water tugged by millions of waves. The skyscrapers looked like enormous gasoline cans, stolid but lacking in grace. A wholly new shopping street, Michigan Avenue, had been whipped up as swiftly as a Hollywood set. Between the business district and the miles upon miles of identical brick houses rising raw out of the prairie wobbled an elevated railway north, south, and west.
And the people, with their curious addiction to introspection and self-analysis. It was a Midwestern quality, Rebecca thought: this touching eagerness to take one on a tour of their inner lives. Such a creature was John Gunther. Rebecca nicknamed the young man "John Silence" because he never stopped talking during the weeks she spent in Chicago. John had the "vitality of seven cart-horses," she later wrote. A "Gothic angel-tall and slender and golden-haired." That was, she added, until he discovered European cooking. She'd later introduce him to her friends in London by saying: "This is John Gunther who comes from Chicago in fact he is Chicago, he is a moral imbecile but a darling."
It was all her doing, Rebecca always said, that John finally left his hometown. She didn't know whether he had any talent at all, but he'd be better off, she told him, if he ceased writing those atrocious short stories and novels and caught a steamer to Europe. Maybe he could earn his living as a foreign correspondent. She thought he was a little in love with her.
John's bosses refused his entreaties to go to London. He was much too green to be entrusted with a position abroad, his editor informed him. He decided to quit his job and leave anyway; the $150 he'd saved would go further in Europe. He had a clutch of letters of introduction from powerful literary agents and publishers to writers such as Rafael Sabatini and Aldous Huxley. Rebecca had promised to show him the town. He booked his passage on the White Star Line's SS Olympic, departing New York for Southampton in October 1924.
It was a lucky break that the Prince of Wales was on the same boat, returning home to England from hi...
Why Not Go?
A "Young-Man-Going-Somewhere" was the way the old-timers at the Chicago Daily News described overeager cub reporters like John Gunther. In 1924, a couple of years out of the University of Chicago, John was dashing between bank robberies, fires, gangster shoot-outs, and Rotary club luncheons. Those were the sorts of stories the lowest guy on the totem pole got assigned at the city's main afternoon paper, but John had already set his sights much higher: he wanted a job at the Daily News's bureau in London. He was fed up with America, its hypocrisy, philistinism, and cant: the Prohibition that didn't really prohibit, the moral regeneration spearheaded by charlatans like the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, the corruption and graft bubbling up under the veneer of postwar "normalcy."
But the postwar disillusionment that had settled over much of American youth was only part of what was ailing John. For more than two years-two fruitless, unavailing years-he'd been trailing around after Helen Hahn, a local belle. He made small talk with her father, ate dinners with her family, sent her letters and books when he was away. John was constant but Helen, a blond stunner, was fickle. Mostly she liked to string him along, touching his arm while they talked, her big blue eyes gazing into his. He'd paid for one of her abortions though the kid definitely wasn't his, which even at the time struck him as the sort of thing only a chump would do. He knew he had to flee.
The arrival of the British writer Rebecca West in Chicago in November 1923 was a beacon from the sophisticated Old World beckoning to the New. West was Britain's most notorious modern woman, a novelist, journalist, and feminist who had just wrenched herself free from an affair with the writer H. G. Wells, immensely famous, twenty-six years her senior, and married.
When John and Rebecca met one evening at the University of Chicago, she was a well-seasoned thirty; he a decidedly tender twenty-two. She was on her first American lecture tour, addressing audiences on such racy subjects as polygamy. There wasn't a man living who could gratify four or five women, Rebecca had insisted: "There are many men who cannot make even one woman happy."
For years Rebecca had been eager to see America, but when she arrived in New York she wasn't all that impressed. "This whole place strikes me as a greedy children's party," she wrote her sister, appalled by the relentless getting and spending. Chicago was different. In its swagger and newness, it wasn't like any place she had ever seen. From her room at the Drake Hotel, she marveled at the never-ending lake, its gray-green wintry water tugged by millions of waves. The skyscrapers looked like enormous gasoline cans, stolid but lacking in grace. A wholly new shopping street, Michigan Avenue, had been whipped up as swiftly as a Hollywood set. Between the business district and the miles upon miles of identical brick houses rising raw out of the prairie wobbled an elevated railway north, south, and west.
And the people, with their curious addiction to introspection and self-analysis. It was a Midwestern quality, Rebecca thought: this touching eagerness to take one on a tour of their inner lives. Such a creature was John Gunther. Rebecca nicknamed the young man "John Silence" because he never stopped talking during the weeks she spent in Chicago. John had the "vitality of seven cart-horses," she later wrote. A "Gothic angel-tall and slender and golden-haired." That was, she added, until he discovered European cooking. She'd later introduce him to her friends in London by saying: "This is John Gunther who comes from Chicago in fact he is Chicago, he is a moral imbecile but a darling."
It was all her doing, Rebecca always said, that John finally left his hometown. She didn't know whether he had any talent at all, but he'd be better off, she told him, if he ceased writing those atrocious short stories and novels and caught a steamer to Europe. Maybe he could earn his living as a foreign correspondent. She thought he was a little in love with her.
John's bosses refused his entreaties to go to London. He was much too green to be entrusted with a position abroad, his editor informed him. He decided to quit his job and leave anyway; the $150 he'd saved would go further in Europe. He had a clutch of letters of introduction from powerful literary agents and publishers to writers such as Rafael Sabatini and Aldous Huxley. Rebecca had promised to show him the town. He booked his passage on the White Star Line's SS Olympic, departing New York for Southampton in October 1924.
It was a lucky break that the Prince of Wales was on the same boat, returning home to England from hi...
