Winston Churchill's imagination

Abstract

Although Churchill is a 1953 Nobel laureate in literature, his famous speeches have overshadowed his other writing. Churchill's Imagination concentrates on key works in modes other than political rhetoric to show how Churchill engages readers with those words and ideas that are hallmarks of his imagination. Chapters take up his literary relationship with Lawrence of Arabia; Churchill's intense but little-known involvement with cinema in an essay on Charlie Chaplin and as a script writer and consultant in the 1930s for Alexander Korda's film studio; Churchill's evocation of paintings as templates for narrative in his first history and in his only novel; his imaginative engagement with science and science fiction; the depiction of time, duration, and alternative history in his biography of Marlborough; and Churchill's last testament in the realm of imagination, The Dream. This is a story that he reserved for posthumous publication, in which a seventy-two-year-old Winston discusses the twentieth century with the ghost of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who died in 1895. Churchill's Imagination is aimed at scholars of literature and history, and general readers interested in Churchill. Paul K. Alkon is Leo S. Bing Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.