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William L. Laurence
William Leonard Laurence (March 7, 1888 - March 19, 1977) was a Jewish Lithuanian-born American journalist known for his science journalism writing of the 1940s and 1950s while working for The New ...view moreWilliam Leonard Laurence (March 7, 1888 - March 19, 1977) was a Jewish Lithuanian-born American journalist known for his science journalism writing of the 1940s and 1950s while working for The New York Times. He won two Pulitzer Prizes and, as the official historian of the Manhattan Project, was the only journalist to witness the Trinity test and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. He is credited with coining the iconic term “Atomic Age” which became popular in the 1950s.
He was born Leib Wolf Siew in Salantai (Russian Empire, now Lithuania) and emigrated to the U.S. in 1905, after participating in the Russian Revolution of 1905. He attended Harvard University, Harvard Law School, and Boston University, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1913. During World War I, he served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and in 1919 attended the University of Besançon in France.
In 1926 he began his career as a journalist, working for The World of New York City. In 1930 he began working at The New York Times, specializing where possible in reporting on scientific issues. He married Florence Davidow in 1931.
In 1934, Laurence co-founded the National Association of Science Writers. In 1936 he covered the Harvard Tercenary Conference of Arts and Sciences, and he and four other science reporters received the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Reporting. For his 1945 coverage of the atomic bomb, beginning with the eyewitness account from Nagasaki, he won a second Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1946. He published an account of the Trinity test that same year, Dawn Over Zero, and continued to work at the Times through the 1940s and 1950s. Two further books followed in 1950 and 1951. In 1956, he was present at the testing of a hydrogen bomb at the Pacific Proving Grounds. That same year, he also became appointed Science Editor of the New York Times and served in this capacity until he retired in 1964.
Laurence died in 1977 in Majorca, Spain, aged 89.view less
Books by William L. Laurence
Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb The Hell Bomb Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings