Джордж Уэллер: Американ журналисі, жазушы және драматург

American novelist, playwright, and journalist (1907–2002)

George Anthony Weller (July 13, 1907 – December 19, 2002) was an American novelist, playwright, and journalist for The New York Times and Chicago Daily News. He won a 1943 Pulitzer Prize as a Daily News war correspondent. Weller's reports from Nagasaki after its August 1945 nuclear bombing were censored by the U. S. military and not published in full until a book edited by his son in 2006.

Weller was born in Boston in 1907 and graduated from the Roxbury Latin School in 1925. He was editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson as a college student graduated from Harvard in 1929. During his senior year there, he wrote the book and co wrote the lyrics for the 83rd annual Hasty Pudding Club musical comedy production, Fireman, Save My Child! He studied acting in Vienna, Austria as the only American member of Max Reinhardt's theater company. Weller was named to the Balkan reporting team of The New York Times, and during the 1930s also published two novels, numerous short stories, and freelance journalism from around Europe. Weller was married twice, first in 1932 to artist Katherine Deupree (1906–1984) of Cincinnati, with whom he had a daughter Ann. They divorced in 1944, and in 1948 he married reporter Charlotte Ebener (1918–1990): their marriage ended with Charlotte's death. In 1957, Weller had a second child, Anthony, by the British ballet teacher and scholar Gladys Lasky Weller (1922–1988), with whom he maintained a relationship for over thirty years.

In December 1940, soon after the beginning of World War II, Weller began working for the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service and covered the war in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific as one of the war's great correspondents, winning a 1943 Pulitzer Prize for his work. He wrote a pamphlet "The Belgian Campaign in Ethiopia" published by the Belgian Information Center as part of its World War II dissemination of information favorable to Belgium and to Belgium's role in the Belgian Congo, a valuable colony then and for many previous decades. This pamphlet is based on 1941 interviews with Belgian officers who led an army consisting of troops who had been local black police in the Belgian Congo, then Belgium's African colony and originally the personal property of King Leopold of Belgium's royal family. The interviews described and celebrated the surrender of Italian General Gazzera and were conducted following the conclusion of the Belgian campaign, a "trek of 2,500 miles through jungle swamps and desert wastes." Anthony Mockler in his definitive work Haile Selassie's War: The Italian Ethiopian Campaign, 1935–1941 states that "troops from the Belgian Congo had reached their 'theatre of operations'—the Baro Salient—in February 1941". Weller reported from Singapore in January 1942. At 8:15 a. m. January 31 the British blew a 70 foot gap in the causeway to Johor. On February 15, 1942, British forces in Singapore surrendered to the Japanese. Giles Playfair, then of the Malaya Broadcasting Corporation, in an entry dated January 29 writes: "Outside the bank I met George Weller who told me that he was off to Java this afternoon and bade me a fond farewell." Weller's reports from Singapore would be published the next year in the book Singapore is Silent. After the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Japan's occupation by the United States, General Douglas MacArthur placed the city under censors and restrictions. To write about the aftermath of the Nagasaki bombing, Weller snuck away from the occupation troops and impersonated an American colonel in obtain assistance from local Japanese police. Like Wilfred Burchett, who was reporting on Hiroshima, Weller ran into the press junket of Tex McCrary, which had been tasked to generate publicity for the United States Army Air Force, including limited coverage of the atomic bombings. After spending days on the ground in Nagasaki, Weller had in 10,000 words details about the radiation poisoning, still unrecognized at the time, suffered by the survivors. He sent a copy to Tokyo for transmission to the United States. The censors in Tokyo, however, rejected the dispatches. Weller's War includes articles which were published (wholly or in part) by Chicago Daily News, Boston Globe(August 31 and September 1, 1945) and London Daily Telegraph(September 1, 1945). Weller's reporting on Nagasaki remains one of his lasting legacies.

Weller headed the Daily News bureau in Rome, and covered the Balkans, Middle East, and Africa. In 1946, he covered the Greek Civil War. He retired in 1975. Weller's wife Charlotte, herself a newspaper writer, often accompanied him on assignments, including Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Weller died at his home in San Felice Circeo, Italy, on December 19, 2002, at the age of 95.

In 1942 Weller interviewed crew members who witnessed an emergency appendectomy performed on Seadragon by Wheeler Bryson Lipes and other non doctors, partly with a tea strainer and spoons. Weller won the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting for his December 14, 1942, Chicago Daily News story "Doc" Lipes Commandeers a Submarine Officers' Wardroom". General Douglas MacArthur honored him by conferring a special distinction: "It is a real pleasure to me to award you the Asiatic Pacific Service Ribbon in view of your long and meritorious services in the Southwest Pacific Area with the forces of this command. You have added luster to the difficult, dangerous and arduous profession of War Correspondent." Weller was also awarded a 1954 George Polk Memorial Award and a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. Late in life he received Italy's Premio Internazionale di Giornalismo. He also provided the inspiration for longtime friend Seán Ó Faoláin's 1974 short story Something, Everything, Anything, Nothing.

A novel of undergraduate life at Harvard. A novel of linked short stories of the American panorama. A novel of wartime Greece. Burlesque show at "the old Willis". Accompanying this short story is a biographical entry titled "Last Man Out". However, the information provided contains no reference to Nagasaki, nor to the prisoner of war camps in Japan although the story is based on events at Omuta (Fukuoka #17 Kyushu).

many publicity photos of Lamarr pages 32–40. War reporting. Eyewitness account of the fall of Singapore. Political history. For young readers. For young readers; later reissued as All About Submarines. unpublished manuscript. An anthology containing Weller's "Flight from Java", a 1942 dispatch concerning his escape.