Author of the week: Paul Reid

last updated 8 January 2015

Paul Reid has just completed a Churchillian task, said James Andrew Miller in The New York Times. More than 30 years after the historian William Manchester began his epic multivolume biography of Winston Churchill, and eight years after Manchester passed away, Reid has finished the job, completing the third volume of The Last Lion. Not bad for a 63-year-old newspaperman who’d never previously written a book. After a long bout with writer’s block and two strokes, Manchester recruited Reid, a features writer at the Palm Beach, Fla., Post, to serve as the third book’s co-author. Reid never dreamed he would end up finishing Defender of the Realm himself. “It was very simple,” he says. “Manchester was dead. If I wasn’t going to do it, it wasn’t going to get done.”

Reid scarcely knew what he was signing up for, said Pam Kelley in the Charlotte, N.C., Observer. Since Manchester’s notes were mostly indecipherable, he had to research the story from scratch, then learn to manage a 1,200-page narrative. A two-year project stretched to seven as Reid burned through savings and piled up debt. “I could never have imagined that it would be so difficult, or have the impact that it had on me and my family,” he says. But Reid’s father had been a Churchill fan, often replaying the war leader’s speeches on a Victrola. So Reid carried on. “When I signed a copy of the galleys for my son, it was one of the best moments of my life,” he says. “On that day, the sacrifice was worth it.”