Walter Lord

John Walter Lord, Jr. (October 8, 1917 – May 19, 2002), was an American author, best known for his documentary-style non-fiction account A Night to Remember (1955), about the sinking of the RMS Titanic.

Early life

Lord was born in Baltimore, Maryland to John Walterhouse Lord and Henrietta neé Hoffman on October 8, 1917. His father, who was a lawyer, died when Lord was just three years old. Lord's grandfather, Richard Curzon Hoffman, was president of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company ("Old Bay Line") steamship firm in the 1890s.

In July 1926, at the age of 9, Lord traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York to Cherbourg and Southampton, on the RMS Olympic, the Titanic's sister ship. Following high school at Baltimore's Gilman School, he studied history at Princeton University and graduated in 1939. Lord then enrolled at Yale Law School, interrupting his studies to join the United States Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. During World War II, he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services as a code clerk in London, in 1942. He was the agency's secretariat when the war ended in 1945. Afterwards, Lord returned to Yale, where he earned a degree in law.