Ted Morgan, writer, biographer, journalist, and historian, born Le Comte Sanche Armand Gabriel de Gramont on March 30, 1932, in Geneva, the son of Gabriel Antoine Armand, Comte de Gramont (1908-1943), a hero of the French Resistance.

After his father's death in a training flight, Morgan began to lead two lives: on the one hand, attending Yale and working as a reporter in Newark and New York, and on the other, still a member (albeit a reluctant one) of the French nobility and serving in the French Army as a second lieutenant and propaganda officer in the Algerian War of Independence.

In 1961, as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and still writing as "Sanche de Gramont," he won the Pulitzer Prize in the category of Local Reporting for what was described as "his moving account of the death of Leonard Warren on the Metropolitan Opera stage," thereby becoming the only French citizen at the time to have ever have won this prize. The singer Leonard Warren had died of a massive cerebral vascular hemorrhage during a performance of La Forza del Destino.

In 1969, he began using the pseudonym "Ted Morgan," an anagram of "De Gramont." In an attempt to discard his aristocratic, European past, he had settled on a "name that conformed with the language and cultural norms of American society, a name that telephone operators and desk clerks could hear without flinching" (On Becoming American, 1978). As "Ted Morgan," he was naturalized as an American citizen in 1977, and has written biographies of Winston Churchill, William S. Burroughs, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt under this name. He was named a 1982 National Book Award Finalist for his biography Maugham.

Books

Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth Century America (2003)

Shovel of Stars: The Making of the American West 1800 to the Present (1996)

Wilderness at Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent (1994)

An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Barbie Trial, and the City of Lyon, 1940-1945 (1990)

Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1990)

FDR: A Biography (1985)

Churchill; A Young Man in A Hurry (1982)

Maugham (1980)

On Becoming American (1978)

The Strong Brown God: The Story of the Niger River (1977) (as Sanche de Gramont)

Epitaph for kings (1969) (as Sanche de Gramont)

The French: Portrait of a people (1969) (as Sanche de Gramont)

The Secret War: The story of international espionage since 1945 (1962) (as Sanche de Gramont)