Marlborough: His Life and Times was a panegyric biography written by Winston Churchill about John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Churchill was a descendant of the duke.
The book comprises four volumes, the first of which appeared in October 1933 (557 pages, 200,000 words) with subsequent volumes in 1934, 1936 and 1938. The publisher was George G Harrup, who in 1929 agreed an advance of £10,000 for the publishing rights, topping the offer mad...
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Marlborough: His Life and Times was a panegyric biography written by Winston Churchill about John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Churchill was a descendant of the duke.
The book comprises four volumes, the first of which appeared in October 1933 (557 pages, 200,000 words) with subsequent volumes in 1934, 1936 and 1938. The publisher was George G Harrup, who in 1929 agreed an advance of £10,000 for the publishing rights, topping the offer made by Churchill's customary publishers, Thornton Butterworth. The American publisher, Scribner's, paid £5000 advance for USA publishing rights. At that time Churchill envisaged writing 180,000 to 250,000 words to be published in no more than two volumes. Cumulative sales of the first volume were 17,000 copies, 15,000 for the second and 10,000 for the third and fourth, which was a respectable though not exceptional performance for such a work.
Churchill had conceived the idea of writing the book by 1929, when the conservative defeat in the...
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