American historian and author Robert H. Ferrell died on August 8 at age 97. Ferrell was best known for his scholarly work on American involvement in World War I, United States diplomacy and several 20th-century presidents, particularly Harry S. Truman. Ferrell served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II and was an Air Force intelligence analyst during the Korean War. After earning a doctorate from Yale in 1951, Ferrell spent several decades as a history professor at Indiana University. He wrote or edited 60 books, including 11 about President Truman, beginning with Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (1980) and including the bestseller Dear Bess (1983), a collection of hundreds of letters Truman wrote to his wife between 1910 and 1959.
Harry S. Truman: A Life (1994) is Ferrell's definitive, single-volume work on the 33rd president. As noted in a New York Times obituary, Ferrel "had an abiding fascination with World War I--in which his father fought--and with the diaries of statesmen and soldiers. But once initiated into Truman's world, Mr. Ferrell kept returning. He spent so much time at the Truman library that he rented an apartment in Independence [Missouri]." Unfortunately for Ferrell, his Truman biography was somewhat overshadowed by David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman, published just a year earlier. Still, Ferrell's opus is available in paperback from the University of Missouri Press ($29.95, 9780826210500). --Tobias Mutter
