Arthur C. Walworth Jr., 101; Pulitzer-winning biographer
Arthur C. Walworth Jr. was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer whose books captured the presidency of Woodrow Wilson in a definitive series that has become a must-read for historians and political scientists.
Mr. Walworth died Jan. 10 at his Needham residence. He was 101.
As a 16-year-old in 1919, Mr. Walworth stood along a Tremont Street parade route in Boston, watching as the nation's 28th president and his entourage rolled by. Wilson had just returned from the Paris Peace Conference. Although he was already a staunch Republican who would go on to get his bachelor's degree from Yale College, there was something that intrigued even a young Mr. Walworth about Wilson, a Democrat and a Princeton man.
Four decades later, it was his 1958 biography of the president that solidified Mr. Walworth's success as a scholar and author. In 1959, ''Woodrow Wilson: American Prophet," earned him the Pulitzer for biography.
But the two-volume biography was just one of his works that would win critical acclaim. His book ''Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919," published in 1986, was hailed by one critic as ''a work of first-class scholarship, a good read, and a treasure trove of insights into this workshop of American foreign policy." In that book, Mr. Walworth asserted that American leaders learned much during the peace negotiations in Paris following World War I.
''Arthur has been hugely important in introducing Wilson's viewpoint to a larger audience, and what he sees as the core of Wilson's internationalism is what he's fearful of seeing America abandon," radio talk-show host Tom Ashbrook said in a 2003 Globe interview.
Born and raised in Newton, Mr. Walworth shared Wilson's interest in baseball starting at a young age.
''My father bought me a bicycle and a Red Sox uniform. I'd wear it everywhere," he recalled in a recent Boston Herald article. ''But one day I was riding the bicycle and had to make a sharp right turn. I didn't know that the road had been tarred. The bicycle went over and that was the end of the uniform."
He graduated from Yale in 1925 and spent a year teaching English and modern European history at the College of Yale-in-China.
He started working for Houghton Mifflin Co.'s education department when he returned to the Bay State, helping to edit textbooks. While working for the Boston publishing company, he wrote ''Black Ships off Japan," which documented diplomacy in Japan dating back to 1853, when a naval fleet commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived to forge diplomatic relations and open up trade.
During World War II, he worked briefly at the Office of War Information, writing news broadcasts. For the next 10 years, he immersed himself in the archival material that would guide his research on Wilson.Mr. Walworth wrote about the president at a time when little had been published on his presidency.
''He was not heavily or thoroughly written up about until Arthur came along," Mr. Walworth's cousin, Southard Lippincott of Newton, said. ''He had an amazingly scholarly ability with footnotes galore and side descriptions, all very accurately researched and supported by documentation."
Scouring libraries both here and in London and Paris, Lippincott said, ''he left no stone unturned."
Over the years, as tens of thousands of pages about Wilson were unsealed, Mr. Walworth continued to update his two-volume biography.
Although his works chronicled many historical events, Mr. Walworth was quick to distance himself from historians with more formal training.
''I don't consider myself an historian," he told the Globe in 2003. ''So I'm not sure what to call myself. A freelancer, I suppose."
At the apex of his career, when he won the Pulitzer, friends and family noticed a marked change in his personality. ''After the Pulitzer, his personality blossomed," Lippincott said. ''He really became a much more outgoing and vivacious person. Before that he was very, very scholarly, and somewhat withdrawn. But that prize was really the highlight of his life."
In the summer months, starting in the 1940s, Mr. Walworth transformed himself into a tennis and sailing instructor at Medomak Camp in Maine.
Mr. Walworth retired in 1985 and moved to the North Hill retirement community in Needham. Although he had ceased to write his own works at that point, he continued to advise others in the field and help edit their works.
When asked the inevitable questions about the secrets to his longevity, he often quipped, ''I've had a life of loafing. No wife, no kids, no mortgage, no stress."
He leaves a sister, Elizabeth Walworth Ross of Essex, Conn.
A memorial service is being planned for later this spring. Burial is in Newton Cemetery. 