Cooke, Alistair 1908–2004

(Alfred Cooke)

PERSONAL: Born Alfred Cooke, November 20, 1908, in Manchester, England; died March 30, 2004, in New York, NY; came to the United States in 1937, naturalized U.S. citizen, 1941; son of Samuel (a Wesleyan preacher) and Mary Elizabeth Cooke; married Ruth Emerson, August 24, 1934 (divorced); married Jane White Hawkes, April 30, 1946; children: (first marriage) John Byrne; (second marriage) Susan Byrne. Education: Jesus College, Cambridge, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1930, diploma in education, 1931; graduate study at Yale University, 1932–33, and Harvard University, 1933–34. Hobbies and other interests: Golf, playing the piano, reading biography/history.

CAREER: British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), London, England, film critic, 1934–37, commentator on U.S. affairs, 1938–2004, broadcaster of Letter from America, 1946–2004. U.S. special correspondent for National Broadcasting Co. (NBC), 1936–37; London correspondent for the London Times, 1938–40; American feature writer for London Daily Herald, 1941–43; Manchester Guardian (now Guardian), United Nations correspondent 1945–48, chief U.S. correspondent, 1948–72. Master of ceremonies for Ford Foundation weekly series on NBC, Columbia Broadcasting Corp. (CBS), and American Broadcasting Corp. (ABC) networks, Omnibus, 1952–61; host for United Nations television series, International Zone, 1961–67, and for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television series, Masterpiece Theatre, 1971–1993; writer and narrator of television series America: A Personal History of the United States, 1972–73.

MEMBER: National Press Club (Washington, DC), Athenaeum Club (London, England), Royal and Ancient Golf Club (St. Andrews, Scotland), San Francisco Golf Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: Commonwealth Fund fellow, 1932–33, and 1933–34; Peabody Award for International News Reporting, 1952; National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy awards, 1958, for Omnibus and 1973, for America; LL.D. from University of Edinburgh, 1969, and University of Manchester, 1973; Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Royal Society of Arts, 1973; Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1973; Litt.D. from the University of St. Andrews, 1975; Medal for Spoken Language, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1983; Litt.D. from Cambridge University, 1988.

WRITINGS:

(Compiler and editor) Garbo and the Nightwatchmen: A Selection from the Writings of British and American Film Critics, J. Cape (London, England), 1937, new edition Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1971, published as Garbo and the Nightwatchmen: A Selection Made in 1937 from the Writings of British and American Film Critics, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1971.

Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1940.

A Generation on Trial: U.S.A. v. Alger Hiss, Knopf (New York, NY), 1950, 2nd edition, 1952, enlarged 2nd edition, Penguin (New York, NY), 1968.

Letter from America (adapted from Letter from America radio series), Hart-Davis (London, England), 1951, published as One Man's America, Knopf (New York, NY), 1952.

Christmas Eve (short stories), Knopf (New York, NY), 1952.

A Commencement Address, Knopf (New York, NY), 1952.

(Compiler) Vintage Mencken, Vintage (New York, NY), 1955.

Around the World in Fifty Years: A Political Travelogue, limited edition, Field Enterprises Educational Corp. (Chicago, IL), 1966.

Talk about America (adapted from Letter from America radio series), Knopf (New York, NY), 1968.

(Author of introduction) General Eisenhower on the Military Churchill: A Conversation with Alistair Cooke, edited by James Nelson, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1970.

Alistair Cooke's America, Knopf (New York, NY), 1973.

Six Men, Knopf (New York, NY), 1977.

The Americans: Fifty Talks on Our Life and Times (adapted from Letter to America radio series), Knopf (New York, NY), 1979, published in England as The Americans: Letters from America on Our Life and Times, Penguin, 1980.

(Author of introduction) Richard Kenin, Return to Albion: Americans in England, 1760–1940, Holt (New York, NY), 1979.

(Author of text) Robert Cameron, Above London: Photographs, Bodley Head (London, England), 1980.

Masterpieces: A Decade of Masterpiece Theatre, Knopf (New York, NY), 1981.

The Patient Has the Floor, Knopf (New York, NY), 1986.

America Observed: From the 1940s to the 1980s, Knopf (New York, NY), 1988.

(Editor) The Vintage Mencken, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1990.

Fun & Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements, Arcade (New York, NY), 1995.

Memories of the Great & the Good, Arcade (New York, NY), 1999.

Letter from America, 1946–2004, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Letter from America Collection (13 volume compact disc set), BBC Audiobooks America (New York, NY), 2004.

The American Home Front, 1941–1942, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to Challenge of Ideas, 1950. Also contributor to periodicals, including New Republic, Spectator, and New Yorker.

SIDELIGHTS: A journalist, broadcaster, and author, Alistair Cooke was fascinated throughout his life with American culture, though he was born in England. He was well known as an erudite and entertaining narrator and host of such programs as Letter From America, Masterpiece Theatre, and Omnibus. Originally entertaining thoughts of becoming a teacher or being involved in the theater, he attended Jesus College, Cambridge, on a scholarship; it was there that he changed his name from Alfred to Alistair and transformed himself into a popular socialite. He edited the college's literary magazine and was involved in theater, cofounding the Cambridge Mummers. He earned a B.A. in 1930 and a diploma in education the next year. A theater fellowship allowed him to travel to the United States in 1932, where he attended Yale University's School of Drama, visited jazz clubs, and even played piano, recording a jazz album for Columbia Records. The next year, he went to Harvard University, where he studied history and English and met H.L. Mencken, with whom Cooke would become friends. This trip reignited his fascination for America and Americans, an interest he had fostered since World War I, when his family housed some U.S. troops. Though he returned to England in 1934 to work as a film critic for the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), he would be back in the United States by 1937, gaining U.S. citizenship in 1941. Making his home in New York City, Cooke maintained ties to England, nevertheless, as a correspondent for the London Times, London Daily Herald, and then the Manchester Guardian, for which he served as a United Nations correspondent for three years and worked as the Guardian's U.S. correspondent until 1972. In 1946, Cooke began hosting Letter From America, a thirteen-minute program for the BBC in which he delved behind the headlines to offer his British audience insights into American life, culture, and politics. The program, which Cooke confessed he did not believe would last very long, remained on the air until illness finally led him to retire in 2004.

However varied the task in his many roles, Cooke was always involved in explaining one side of the Atlantic to the other. Reviewing Cooke's interpretive work, many critics hold the opinion voiced by Katherine Winton Evans in the Washington Post Book World: "You couldn't ask for a more civilized, fair-minded fellow to explain us to the outside world—and maybe to ourselves." Moira Hodgson remarked in a New York Times Book Review article that "it is a mammoth task to explain America to foreigners, particularly to those who have never been here. Alistair Cooke has been telling the British about the Americans with enormous success for over forty years."

Cooke's writings and discourse delineated the progress of his career. His first books—Garbo and the Nightwatchmen: A Selection from the Writings of British and American Film Critics and Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character, for example—reflected his early interest in the performing arts. Cooke's later books, such as Talk about America and The Americans: Fifty Talks on Our Life and Times, are collections of radio and television essays in which he gives his personal views on his adopted home and its citizens. Cooke's radio program became the basis for the author's first book of personal glimpses of his adopted country, One Man's America. The book became a surprise bestseller, as did Alistair Cooke's America (based on his television series America: A Personal History). Cooke's third book of talks adapted from his radio program, The Americans, made the best-seller list too, with more than 80,000 hardcover copies in print.

Cooke's writings have received generally favorable reviews. Joy Gerville-Reache commented in the Christian Science Monitor: "Cooke is an extraordinarily gifted commentator…. His tributes [in The Ameri-cans] to famous Americans … are penetrating, instructive, and compassionate." "Thousands of other professional broadcasters have … attempted the adjustment of the spoken to the written word, without the slightest success, a fact which suggests that Cooke is as unique as the hippogriff [a legendary animal having the foreparts of a griffin and the body of a horse]," remarked Benny Green in the Spectator. Green continued: "He is, in fact, one of the most gifted and urbane essayists of the century, a supreme master of that form of literary work…. [The Americans is] … the most readable, informative, and engaging collection of essays on literate subjects to be published this year."

In 1987, Cooke sent his two thousandth Letter From America, making the series the longest-running radio program in history. Noting the difficulties of being an interpretive reporter, Cooke wrote in The Americans: "A foreign correspondent is both an interpreter and a victim of his subject matter. He must be aware of his own changing view of the country he's assigned to."

Cooke remained the host of Masterpiece Theatre for over twenty years, retiring in 1993, his stately image burned in the minds of a generation of Americans. As for Letter From America, in over a half-century of broadcasts, he witnessed and commented on a wide range of historical events, from World War II to 9/11. Reviewing an audio collection of these broadcasts, Nola Theiss of Kliatt praised Cooke's vision of his adopted country as "full of wonder and awe at the quality of life he sees around him."

Cooke died in 2004, shortly after giving up his Letter From America broadcast. His book The American Home Front, 1941–1942, was published posthumously, after having been rediscovered many decades after it was first written and rejected by his publisher. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, thus ushering the United States into World War II, Cooke traveled around the country, by rail and by automobile in a pre-freeway era and encountering rations of gasoline and rubber tires, asking people their thoughts about the war and life in general. He wanted to give British readers a sense of the individuals who comprised the country as opposed to the political forces in Washington and the voices of power and industry in New York. He was struck by the contrast between the United States and Great Britain, which had been fighting the war for nearly two years at the time and had suffered extreme devastation. In the American West, life had barely been disrupted, and many citizens remained ignorant about the war, politics, and life beyond the borders of their own towns. The South remained mired in Jim Crow laws, and in California the country's Japanese-American citizens were corralled into prison camps. In the waning days of the depression, the country showed evidence of substantial social problems, even as the dawn of a new era, bolstered by a burgeoning war economy, blossomed. Through it all, Cooke became "prescient about postwar possibilities," wrote Gilbert Taylor in Booklist.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Authors in the News, Volume 1, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1976.

Clark, Nick, Alistair Cooke: The Biography, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1999.

Cooke, Alistair, The Americans: Fifty Talks on Our Life and Times, Knopf (New York, NY), 1979.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 1, 2006, Gilbert Taylor, review of The American Home Front, 1941–1942, p. 66.

Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 1977, review of Six Men, p. 27; November 13, 1979, Joy Gerville-Reache, review of The Americans, p. B3.

Kliatt, July, 2006, Nola Theiss, review of Letter from America Collection, p. 58.

Library Journal, April 1, 2006, Elizabeth Morris, review of The American Home Front: 1941–1942, p. 107.

New York Times, November 14, 1979, Anatole Broyard, review of The Americans, p. C3; November 25, 1988, John Gross, review of America Observed: From the 1940s to the 1980s, p. C30.

New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1977, review of Six Men, p. 10; November 11, 1979, Moira Hodgson, review of The Americans, p. 12; June 1, 1986, Bernard Avishai, review of The Patient Has the Floor, p. 7.

Time, December 3, 1973, review of Alistair Cooke's America, p. 107.

Times Literary Supplement, November 30, 1973, review of Alistair Cooke's America, p. 1481.

Spectator, November 10, 1979, Benny Green, review of The Americans, p. 22.

Washington Post Book World, December 23, 1979, Katherine Winton Evans, review of The Americans, p. 9; June 3, 1986, E. Fuller Torrey, review of The Patient Has the Floor.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, March 31, 2004, Section 3, p. 9.

Los Angeles Times, March 31, 2004, p. B9.

New York Times, March 31, 2004, p. C12.

Times (London, England), March 31, 2004, p. 29.

Washington Post, March 31, 2004, p. B7.