The Dream

By Winston S. Churchill

A powerful, emotional short story from the prime minister and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, detailing a conversation with the ghost of his beloved father.
 
Legendary politician and military strategist Winston S. Churchill was a master not only of the battlefield, but of the page and the podium. Over the course of forty books and countless speeches, broadcasts, news items and more, he addressed a country at war and at peace, thrilling with victory but uneasy with its shifting role in global politics. In 1953, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for “his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.” During his lifetime, he enthralled readers and brought crowds roaring to their feet; in the years since his death, his skilled writing has inspired generations of eager history buffs.
 
In this rare work of fiction, Churchill imagines a visit from the ghost of his father, Randolph. Churchill reveals to his father all that has happened in the world since his death in 1895, leaving out one crucial detail: his own critical role in determining the unfolding of world events. His yearning for his late father shines through his terse, careful prose, lending emotional weight and nostalgia to this unusual foray into fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780795329388

Book preview

The Dream

Winston S. Churchill

Copyright

The Dream

First published 1966. © The Master and Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge

Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Image of Winston Churchill at the funeral of the 8th Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace, 1934 reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown, London, on behalf of The Broadwater Collection, an archive of photographs owned by the Churchill family and held at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.

Cover jacket design by Alexia Garaventa

ISBN ePub edition: 9780795329388

Contents

Introduction

The Dream

Afterword

Contributors

A Letter to Lord Randolph

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The short story you are about to read is the most mysterious and ethereal that Winston Spencer Churchill ever wrote—and as the gifted author of twenty million words and ten thousand speeches, he had many opportunities. But the more one knows about Churchill, the more one understands how he came to write The Dream, and why this small offering tells us so much about the inner life of the man whose hours upon the public stage saved liberty at a moment of extreme danger.

Churchill wrote the story in 1947, a low point in his political career. Two years earlier, British voters had turned his Conservative Party out of office. Easily reelected to his own seat, the former Prime Minister became a frustrated but feisty Leader of the Opposition. Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise, his wife, Clementine, had observed at the time. At the moment, Churchill had shot back, "it seems quite