Wohl, Robert 1936–

PERSONAL: Born February 13, 1936, in Butte, MT; son of Albert and Lani (Rowan) Wohl; married Monica Birgitta Lindros, July 4, 1966; children: Anna Maria. Education: Attended Dartmouth College, 1953–54; University of California, Los Angeles, A.B., 1957; graduate study at Harvard University, 1959–60, and École des Sciences Politiques, 1960–61; Princeton University, Ph.D., 1963.

ADDRESSES: Home—16 Latimer Rd., Santa Monica, CA 90402. Office—Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles, 6265 Bunche Hall, Box 951473, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473.

CAREER: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, instructor, 1961–63, assistant professor of history, 1963–64; University of California, Los Angeles, assistant professor, 1964–67, associate professor, 1967–69, professor of history, beginning 1969, chair of department, 1970–73.

MEMBER: American Historical Association, Society for Italian Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson fellowship, 1957–58; Ford Foundation fellowship, 1959–61; George Louis Beer Prize for European History, American Historical Association, 1967, for French Communism in the Making; Social Science Research Council fellowship, 1968–69; National Endowment for the Humanities senior fellowship, 1978–79; prize from Pacific Coast branch of American Historical Association, 1980, and National Book Award, History, 1982, both for The Generation of 1914; Guggenheim fellowship, 1981–82.

WRITINGS:

French Communism in the Making, 1914–1924, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1966.

The Generation of 1914, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1979.

A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1994.

The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Presents Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight, North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh, NC), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Historian Robert Wohl's area of interest is modern European history, particularly European politics and culture since 1880. His books include volumes that document aviation history. In the first, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918, Wohl notes the importance of France to early aviation. That country was home to the first major manufacturer of airplanes and initiated both the first training school and the first aviation competition. He documents the daring of the "flying aces" of World War I and the mythology that grew up around the pilots that first took to the skies. The volume contains more than one hundred photographs, postings, drawings, and paintings, many of them rare and one third in color. Wohl explains how the airplane provided inspiration to such writers as H.G. Wells and Franz Kafka, as well as artists.

The second volume in this series, The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950, takes aviation history forward to the middle of the twentieth century. Here Wohl writes of the record-breaking flights, including Lindbergh's 1927 Atlantic Ocean crossing, a feat that made him a demigod in the eyes of many young men and women at the time. Brave pilots from other countries are covered as well, including Italians Gabriele D'Annunzio and Italo Balbo, and Wohl examines the aviation culture in Mussolini's Fascist Italy. Spectator reviewer Montagu Curzon wrote that "the French were the most lastingly poetic: think only of Saint-Exupery. The saga of the Aeropostale, pushing out its routes down the North African coast, over-flying ferocious tribes, before taking the plunge across a hostile South Atlantic to Brazil, Argentina and over the Andes to Chile, was, and remains, one of the great tales of French bravery, a modern addition to the national myth in which flying is portrayed as 'a transcendent calling' and the pilot as a monastic knight on his quest: never mind if it was the unlikely one of delivering the mail."

Between the world wars, the airplane became an icon featured in film, but with the close of the 1920s the age of solo pilots was largely over. Wohl follows the airplane's history through World War II and notes its impact on its unfolding and outcome, the fear instilled in populations threatened by bombers, and the decimation caused by payloads dropped over cities like Hiroshima during World War II. J.G. Ballard reviewed The Spectacle of Flight for the Guardian Unlimited Books Web site, writing that "those looking for a little instant nostalgia should open Wohl's lavishly illustrated book, smell the reek of old flying leathers and feel the past rush like slipstream off its pages."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2005, George Cohen, review of The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950, p. 1734.

Choice, November, 2005, M. Levinson, review of The Spectacle of Flight, p. 505.

Library Journal, June 1, 2005, John Carver Edwards, review of The Spectacle of Flight, p. 151.

Publishers Weekly, November 28, 1994, review of A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918, p. 50.

Spectator, August 20, 2005, Montagu Curzon, review of The Spectacle of Flight, p. 42.

ONLINE

Guardian Unlimited Books, http://books.guardian.co.uk/ (May 9, 2005), J.G. Ballard, review of The Spectacle of Flight.