Churchill at Scribner’s: A Study in Failure

Winston Churchill began his authorial career just four years after the United States Congress ratified an international copyright agreement, opening up a vast new market for British writers. The lack of such an agreement had cost Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde untold sums in royalties. Churchill always deliberately wrote for audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1901 he proposed the creation of an Anglo-American Academy, along the lines of the Académie Française, that would standardize U.S. and U.K. English and prevent their drifting too far apart. That common language, he argues, “enables a writer to reach twice as many people—an actor can appeal to two publics.” Churchill had very limited success, however, in reaching American readers before the Second World War. In literature as well as politics, his romance with what he called “the Great Republic” was, for a long time, unrequited.

When he published his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), he told his mother “It ought to have some circulation in America— and this should be carefully looked to.” But neither this nor any of his other accounts of imperial wars appealed to Americans. London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900), his report on the Boer War, sold 11,454 copies in Britain; but of the American edition at most 1,850 were bought and at least 1,000 were pulped.

In December 1900 Churchill began a North American lecture tour, hoping for the kind of success that Dickens and Wilde had enjoyed. But there was much pro-Boer sentiment among Americans, especially Irish-Americans. In Baltimore he spoke to a nearly empty hall; in Chicago and Minneapolis he was loudly heckled; at Ann Arbor his speech was disrupted. Dickens had reportedly earned £20,000 on his 1867–68 American tour, and Churchill was willing to settle for £5,000, but the actual total was £1,300, barely a third of what he had netted for a briefer tour of the United Kingdom.

In January 1906 Macmillan published Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s biography of his father. Paul Revere Reynolds, America’s first literary agent, had offered the book to Charles Scribner’s Sons for a $10,000 advance. “Winston Churchill is a bright young man and will make the most of his material,” concluded an internal Scribner memorandum; “but there is not much of vital interest in the subject.” Why would Americans want to read about a dead British politician known mainly for his opposition to Home Rule? In Britain it sold 6,250 copies by May 1907 but only one-tenth of that number in America, earning less than half of Winston’s £500 U.S. advance. His imperial travelogue, My African Journey (1908), was also offered to Scribner’s, and again they wisely refused it. Published by Hodder and Stoughton, it sold more than 10,000 copies throughout the British Empire but just 1,400 in the United States.

By December 1915 Churchill’s political fortunes had crashed. The disaster at Gallipoli had ended his tenure as first lord of the Admiralty, and he was trying to redeem himself by serving on the Western Front with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. At this moment of depression his mother shared with him a letter from her nephew, Shane Leslie, a British intelligence officer serving in the United States: “I must write to tell you how great [Winston] looms in his mother-country, America,” he gushed. There his speeches were widely read and admired, and sending him to the front lines in France was regarded in America as yet another blunder by the British government: “With so many pawns at their disposal they can hardly spare the only effective knight in their control.”

Churchill’s departure from the Admiralty allowed him to resume his second career as a journalist, and now for the first time he established a secure beachhead in the American newspaper and magazine market. Between 1916 and 1919 he published in the New York Tribune, Collier’s, Outlook, Century Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and...