George Dangerfield

British-American · 1904 to 1986

George Bubb Dangerfield was born on October 28, 1904, in Newbury, Berkshire, England, and educated at Forest School in Walthamstow before earning his degree from Hertford College, Oxford, in 1927. His first memory, he later wrote, was of being held up to a window as a small child and shown Halley's Comet blazing over the English sky in 1910, an image he would place at the very opening of the book that made his name. He moved to the United States in 1930, worked as literary editor of Vanity Fair from 1933 to 1935, and became an American citizen in 1943, the same decade he married Mary Lou Schott. In 1935 he published The Strange Death of Liberal England, a mocking, brilliantly written account of how the Liberal Party's grip on Britain collapsed between 1906 and 1914 under the pressure of the House of Lords crisis, Irish Home Rule, the suffragette movement, and militant trade unionism. The book found few readers among professional historians at first, but its lively, ironic voice slowly won it a devoted following, and it is now counted among the most influential works of narrative history of its century. Dangerfield served with the US Army's 102nd Infantry Division during the Second World War, then turned his attention to American history, publishing The Era of Good Feelings in 1952, a study of the years between the War of 1812 and Andrew Jackson's presidency that won both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize in 1953. He wrote several further works of American and Anglo-Irish history over the following decades, taught for some years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was the father of three children, Mary Jo, Hilary, and Anthony. Dangerfield died of leukemia in Santa Barbara on December 27, 1986, at the age of eighty-two.