The World Crisis Breeds New Publishing Relationships For Churchill
Finest Hour|Fall 2018
This is a behind-the-scenes article. It focuses not on the content of The World Crisis (which former Prime Minister A. J. Balfour described as “Winston’s brilliant Autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe”) but rather on how that multi-volume history of the Great War—Churchill’s twelfth work—came to be published in both the UK and the USA.
Ronald I. Cohen
The World Crisis Breeds New Publishing Relationships For Churchill

As an established author, Winston Churchill had had a number of publishing relationships on both sides of the Atlantic, some of which were more enduring than others. His first was with Longmans Green, which had published his first five books (from the The Story of the Malakand Field Force to Ian Hamilton’s March) in both London and New York between 1898 and 1900. Then, after a brief fling with Macmillan (which had overpaid for the rights to Lord Randolph Churchill), Churchill moved to Hodder & Stoughton in London between 1908 and 1910 for the publication of My African Journey and the speech volumes Liberalism and the Social Problem and the now exceedingly rare The People’s Rights.

There followed a publication famine from Churchill’s appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911 through the end of the decade. Consequently, when Churchill determined to write a history of the First World War, he had no obvious publishing firm to approach. He was very much a free agent.

Mr. Thornton Butterworth

By chance, on 22 October 1920, the Associated Newspapers asked Churchill to review the new Autobiography of Margot Asquith for the munificent sum of £250 (the rough equivalent of which today would be $12,200). The article appeared on 4 November, and Asquith’s grateful publisher Thornton Butterworth wrote Churchill five days later, saying:

I have been deeply gratified by your most recent admirable review in “The Daily Mail.” I was greatly impressed by the tactful kindness of such criticism as had to be adverse and entire fairmindedness shown to the book throughout….May I add that if at any time you decide to write a new book, I should esteem it a very great favour if you would allow me the privilege of publishing it.

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