George Weller

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George Weller bigraphy, stories - American journalist

George Weller : biography

July 13, 1907 – December 19, 2002

George Anthony Weller (July 13, 1907 – December 19, 2002) was an American novelist, playwright, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times and Chicago Daily News. He was a native of Boston and a former editorial chair of The Harvard Crimson.

Weller’s reports from Nagasaki after the nuclear bombing were censored by the United States military but appeared in a book in 2002.

Legacy

The Notes to Last Train from Hiroshima state: "As it was, Weller’s notes were confiscated and classified. Later, his carbon copies were stored and replicated (in edited form) as internal military and Atomic Energy Commission documents—and in time, they became more or less gospel."

The Atomic Energy Commission’s successor agency the Department of Energy was asked for all records by or about George Weller from September 1945 and after. Assigned to the Executive Secretariat a search was conducted of documents in the Record Storage maintained by the History Division: nothing was found.

Weller stated in his article published in the Chicago Daily News Saturday August 14, 1965: "The original notes and the original stories are buried in a family attic in New England."

In the foreword to his Weller’s final book, First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, Walter Cronkite wrote: "This is an important book—important and gripping. For the first time in print we can read the details of the nuclear bombardment of Nagasaki, Japan, as written by the first American reporter on the terrible scene … [George Weller’s] reports, so long delayed but now salvaged by his son, at last have saved our history from the military censorship that would have preferred to have time to sanitize the ghastly details … Also delayed by MacArthur’s censorship were Weller’s dispatches from his visits to American prison camps [w]here he uncovered the Japanese military’s savage treatment of their American prisoners … There is so much in this volume that we never knew or have long forgotten. This volume of the last generation’s history is an important reminder, a warning to inspire civilian vigilance."

Footnotes

Published and Unpublished Works

Fiction

  • A novel of undergraduate life at Harvard.
  • A novel of linked short stories of the American panorama.
  • .
  • A novel of wartime Greece.
  • Burlesque show at "the old Willis".
  • Accompanying this short story is a biographical entry titled "Last Man Out". However, the information provided contains no reference to Nagasaki, nor to the prisoner of war camps in Japan although the story is based on events at Omuta (Fukuoka #17 Kyushu).

Non-fiction

  • many publicity photos of Lamarr pages 32–40.
  • War reporting.
  • Eyewitness account of the fall of Singapore.
  • Political history.
  • For young readers.
  • For young readers. (Later published under the name All About Submarines.)
  • unpublished manuscript.
  • An anthology containing Weller’s “Flight from Java,” a 1942 dispatch concerning his escape.

Plays

  • Walking Time
  • Farewell, Ulysses
  • Second Saint of Cyprus
  • Friendly Relations
  • The Impossible Immortals (a comedy in three acts). This play takes place in Italy after World War II, during the years of the rivalry between Santayana and Berenson.

Life and career

Weller was born in Boston on July 13, 1907, and graduated from the Roxbury Latin School in 1925 and Harvard College in 1929. During his senior year at Harvard, Weller wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics for the 83rd annual Hasty Pudding Club musical comedy production Fireman, Save My Child!

He studied acting in Vienna, Austria as the only American member of Max Reinhardt’s theater company. Weller was named to the Balkan reporting team of The New York Times, and during the 1930s also published two novels, numerous short stories, and freelance journalism from around Europe.Betty Wason, Miracle in Hellas: The Greeks Fight On. "Departure from Athens", 1943, pp.109–111.