Geoffrey Ward

Geoffrey Champion Ward (born 1940) is an editor, author, historian and writer of scripts for American history documentaries for public television. He is the author or co-author of 18 books, including five companion books to the documentaries he has written. He is the winner of seven Emmy Awards.

Biography

Youth

Ward was born in Newark, Ohio, and a graduate of Oberlin College (1962). His father was F. Champion Ward, educator and a devisor of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. Ward spent some of his boyhood years in India.

Career

Early career

Ward was the founding editor of Audience Magazine (1970-1973) and the editor of American Heritage Magazine (1977-1982). His 1989 biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, A First-class Temperament: the Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Later career

The principal writer of the television mini-series The Civil War (1990), Ward has collaborated with its co-producer Ken Burns on most of the documentaries he has made since, including Jazz, Baseball, The War and Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. This work has garnered him five Emmy Awards. He also won two Emmys for the American Experience series, including The Kennedys, in 1992 and TR,The Story of Theodore Roosevelt in 1996. His script for the documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, won the Writers Guild of America Award in 2005 and the accompanying book won the 2006 William Hill Sports Book of the Year and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for best biography.

Geoffrey Ward (rugby league)

Geoffrey G. Ward is a former professional rugby league footballer of the 1950s and '60s, playing at representative level for Yorkshire, and at club level for Castleford, as a centre, i.e. number 3 or 4.

Playing career

County honours

Geoffrey Ward won a cap playing centre, i.e. number 3 for Yorkshire while at Castleford in the 33-10 victory over Lancashire at Hull's stadium on 23 September 1964.

References

External links