Pierre van Paassen
Encyclopedia
Pierre van Paassen was a Dutch–Canadian-American journalist, writer, and Unitarian
minister. He was born in Gorinchem
, Netherlands
, then emigrated with his parents to Canada in 1914. After entering a seminary, he served as a missionary to Ruthenian immigrants in the Alberta hinterland, where he helped with medical work. In 1917 he left theological school to serve with the Canadian army in France in World War I as an infantryman and sapper
.
In 1921 he became a journalist with the Toronto Globe, and a year later moved to the U.S. and began writing a syndicated column for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. From 1924 to 1931, Van Paassen worked as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the New York Evening World
, based in Paris. After the World folded, he became a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star
.
Van Paassen spoke Dutch, French, English, and some Ruthenian (a language similar enough to Ukrainian that it allowed him to converse passably with many Russians), and later learned Hebrew.
He gained fame reporting on the conflicts among Arabs, British, Jews and French in the Middle East, as well as on the on-going African slave trade and colonial problems in North Africa and the Horn of Africa. He reported on Benito Mussolini
's Italo-Ethiopian War
, the Spanish Civil War
and other European and colonial conflicts.
From his earliest travels to Palestine in 1925, he saw and developed a regard for the work of the early Jewish immigrants to improve the area's agriculture and industry. Later he became one of the first non-Jews in America to write favorably about the campaign to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, and remained a Zionist supporter afterwards. But fundamentally, Van Paassen was a Christian Democratic Socialist concerned, as he put it in his autobiographical Days of Our Years, with the enduring struggle for justice for ordinary individuals. He was a staunch opponent of fascism
in Italy, Germany and France from the 1920s, reinforced by the ten days he spent as a prisoner in the Dachau Concentration Camp in late March 1933. His activities as a correspondent brought "expulsion from France by Pierre Laval
, from Germany by Joseph Goebbels
and from Eritrea
by Count Ciano."
In 1933 Van Paassen traveled incognito to the Dome of the Rock
, a famous Islamic shrine
in Jerusalem. He was accompanied by a British Intelligence officer, and both smeared their faces and hands with burnt cork to give them an Arab
appearance. They also wore long white garments to give them a "Hadjihs
" appearance. Their evasiveness was a necessity, for nonbelievers
were (and still are) not allowed in areas that are considered to be the holiest places in the world of Islam. The purpose of their venture was to get an inside look at the radical movement by listening to what the Mullahs were preaching in regards to the political turmoil that was taking place in then British controlled Palestine
. Three years later The Great Uprising
took form. This redoubled political violence was in part planned by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni
, whom Van Paassen had interviewed in 1929 about his incitement of the bloody uprising that year against the Jews in Palestine.
, Samuel Spivak, David Darrah Gedye, and myself discovered only too soon that if we did speak out, we did not last very long, either in the countries in which we were stationed or in our jobs."
Van Paassen became a United States citizen in 1947.
In his 1964 book To Number Our Days, Van Paassen wrote more about many of the same subjects he covered in Days of Our Years, especially the maneuvers of pre-World War II Europe's empires. The book only slightly extends Van Paassen's account past the period before the U.S. entered the war, but includes much about his pre-war life as a roving correspondent. Van Paassen's views of the potential of the Soviet Union appear to have changed between 1939 and 1941, and here he writes less about Russia, and less optimistically about it, than in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s.
In his books Van Paassen was not a rigorous historian, but used vivid accounts often taken from first hand encounters with participants in the conflicts about which he wrote. During the 1929 Palestine uprising, after his reporting on the massacres contradicted both the Mufti's statements and local British officials' news releases, he became the target of several assassination attempts, after the last of which a Captain Saunders pointedly asked, "Moreover, why do these things happen to you? I have received no complaints from your colleagues of the press in Jerusalem." Subsequently he became persona non grata at Government House, but insisted that "I believe my offense was that I took nothing for granted.... I questioned everybody...".
"On the other hand, against the evil of Germany's collapse stood the alternative of giving Adolf Hitler, under a Four-Power accord, carte blanche to break out of his dangerous isolation by clearing himself a road through Czechoslovakia to the oil and wheat fields of Rumania, thus putting him in possession of the wherewithal to risk a war of long duration with the Soviet Union. For it is Russia, which Herr Hitler, by a stroke of the pen, has relegated to Asia, that is to provide Germany with the markets and colonies she lacks at present. In this way Germany's pressure on the Western imperialisms will be lessened, and at the same time the intolerable burden of carrying the Reich's colossal war machine will be shifted, at least partially, from the shoulders of the German people to those of the prospective colonial tribes in the Muscovite plan.
"To prevent an interimperialist European war by coming to an understanding with Nazi ambition for expansion in Eastern Europe has been the fundamental directive of England's foreign policy under Baldwin and Chamberlain. Having her eyes on the Far East, where Japan has arisen as the next historical challenger of British naval and colonial power, Britain desires above all else to have her hands free for the struggle she must wage in the Pacific. For, as England in the past has successively destroyed the naval power of Spain, Holland, Louis XIV, Napoleonic France and Imperial Germany, she must sooner or later envisage checking Japan before her spheres of influence in China and her Indian, Malay, and Australian possessions are threatened by that new and determined rival.
"England will fight, therefore, not for democracy and not in Europe if she can at all prevent it, but to safeguard her imperial interests where they are at stake... in the East.
"...It could therefore be predicted with reasonable certainty after the smoothly effected annexation of Austria that Czechoslovakia would be the next link in the chain encircling Germany to be sacrificed, and, thereafter, that Poland, Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia are to be similarly abandoned when Hitler judges the time opportune to take another step in easterly direction."
Earlier, Germany's January 1936 commercial contracts for the output of the Spanish and Spanish Moroccan mines had gone awry with the opposition of a newly elected government in Madrid. "Even so, the need for raw materials was pressing. Germany's war stocks were of the scantiest. Rather than forgo the unlimited supply that the mines of Iberia and the Riff offered, Hitler summoned General Sanjurjo from Lisbon (where he was living in banishment) to Berlin in March 1936, and the plot for a military insurrection against the Republic with the aid of the Fuehrer and Signor Mussolini was hatched." After Sanjurjo's death his lieutenant, General Franco, duly launched the planned war from Morocco.
But the Prime Minister of France, Léon Blum
, said that "...every time we make a move to help the Spanish Republic, we are warned by Downing Street that if we become involved in war with Italy and Germany over Spain, France cannot count on British support."
Van Paassen was convinced that the British Empire's farsighted military planners and political leaders were not entirely displeased to see France's position weakened by Germany at that time, as it improved Britain's relative dominance over its ancient rival, France, in Britain's drive for worldwide hegemony. "By his intervention in Spain, Herr Hitler, moreover, rendered Britain the immense service of laying an ax to the French military hegemony in Europe (which had been a thorn in Britain's side ever since Versailles
). By the creation of a third hostile frontier, he made the Quai d'Orsay so absolutely dependent on England that France lost her freedom of action entirely and was reduced to the status of a second-rate power..."
"In December 1936, Germany had the satisfaction of receiving the first shipments of iron ore from Spanish Morocco and a year later had not only the mines of the Asturias under her control, but had ordered Franco, in exchange for artillery tanks, Junker planes and ammunition, to have one million tons of ore, antimony, tin, copper and lignite in German ports by the end of 1939."
"In reality, the civil war in Spain strengthened Hitler so enormously that in the perspective of history that dolorous episode may well come to be known as the starting point of the Nazi mastery of Europe."
In 1941, Van Paassen wrote, "To many observers, amongst them a number of statesmen, the civil war in Spain at one time appeared to be nothing more significant than a bloody dispute between adherents of two equally obnoxious ideologies, Fascism and Communism. Whichever of the two contending parties came out victorious seemed, therefore, a matter of supreme indifference. Only in 1941 did it become clear that Franco's early victories in 1937 had laid the ground for Hitler's final blow to Great Britain's Mediterranean position in 1941."
At the same time he wrote, "The assumption that the Battle of the Atlantic is the pivot upon which world history turns is false. Britain as an empire stands or falls with the control of the Near East."
In "To Number Our Days" published in 1964, after viewing the plight of Blacks in Atlanta and after discussing President Franklin Roosevelt sympathetically as introducing "creeping socialism" (in the context as that term was understood in 1964), he notes that he made a prediction sealed in a vault at Oglethorpe University in 1942: "My prediction ran this way:...In AD 2042 when Oglethorpe's vault is opened, there will be a socialist president in Washington. He will be a Negro!" (p.248).
Unitarianism
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
minister. He was born in Gorinchem
Gorinchem
Gorinchem , also called Gorkum , is a city and municipality in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. The municipality covers an area of 21.99 km² of which 3.03 km² is water...
, Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
, then emigrated with his parents to Canada in 1914. After entering a seminary, he served as a missionary to Ruthenian immigrants in the Alberta hinterland, where he helped with medical work. In 1917 he left theological school to serve with the Canadian army in France in World War I as an infantryman and sapper
Sapper
A sapper, pioneer or combat engineer is a combatant soldier who performs a wide variety of combat engineering duties, typically including, but not limited to, bridge-building, laying or clearing minefields, demolitions, field defences, general construction and building, as well as road and airfield...
.
In 1921 he became a journalist with the Toronto Globe, and a year later moved to the U.S. and began writing a syndicated column for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. From 1924 to 1931, Van Paassen worked as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the New York Evening World
New York World
The New York World was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 until 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers...
, based in Paris. After the World folded, he became a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star
Toronto Star
The Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...
.
Van Paassen spoke Dutch, French, English, and some Ruthenian (a language similar enough to Ukrainian that it allowed him to converse passably with many Russians), and later learned Hebrew.
He gained fame reporting on the conflicts among Arabs, British, Jews and French in the Middle East, as well as on the on-going African slave trade and colonial problems in North Africa and the Horn of Africa. He reported on Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
's Italo-Ethiopian War
Second Italo-Abyssinian War
The Second Italo–Abyssinian War was a colonial war that started in October 1935 and ended in May 1936. The war was fought between the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy and the armed forces of the Ethiopian Empire...
, the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
and other European and colonial conflicts.
Journalistic career
In addition to his popular storytelling in the frequently ephemeral human interest stories that the papers principally hired him to write, van Paassen's many other personal accounts from the field brought home to American readers the often harsh results of European internal turmoil and of the foreign adventures of the interwar European colonial powers.From his earliest travels to Palestine in 1925, he saw and developed a regard for the work of the early Jewish immigrants to improve the area's agriculture and industry. Later he became one of the first non-Jews in America to write favorably about the campaign to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, and remained a Zionist supporter afterwards. But fundamentally, Van Paassen was a Christian Democratic Socialist concerned, as he put it in his autobiographical Days of Our Years, with the enduring struggle for justice for ordinary individuals. He was a staunch opponent of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
in Italy, Germany and France from the 1920s, reinforced by the ten days he spent as a prisoner in the Dachau Concentration Camp in late March 1933. His activities as a correspondent brought "expulsion from France by Pierre Laval
Pierre Laval
Pierre Laval was a French politician. He was four times President of the council of ministers of the Third Republic, twice consecutively. Following France's Armistice with Germany in 1940, he served twice in the Vichy Regime as head of government, signing orders permitting the deportation of...
, from Germany by Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
and from Eritrea
Eritrea
Eritrea , officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea derives it's name from the Greek word Erethria, meaning 'red land'. The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast...
by Count Ciano."
In 1933 Van Paassen traveled incognito to the Dome of the Rock
Dome of the Rock
The Dome of the Rock is a shrine located on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. The structure has been refurbished many times since its initial completion in 691 CE at the order of Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik...
, a famous Islamic shrine
Shrine
A shrine is a holy or sacred place, which is dedicated to a specific deity, ancestor, hero, martyr, saint, daemon or similar figure of awe and respect, at which they are venerated or worshipped. Shrines often contain idols, relics, or other such objects associated with the figure being venerated....
in Jerusalem. He was accompanied by a British Intelligence officer, and both smeared their faces and hands with burnt cork to give them an Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
appearance. They also wore long white garments to give them a "Hadjihs
Hajji
Hajji or El-Hajj, is an honorific title given to a Muslim person who has successfully completed the Hajj to Mecca, and is often used to refer to an elder, since it can take time to accumulate the wealth to fund the travel. The title is placed before a person's name...
" appearance. Their evasiveness was a necessity, for nonbelievers
Kafir
Kafir is an Arabic term used in a Islamic doctrinal sense, usually translated as "unbeliever" or "disbeliever"...
were (and still are) not allowed in areas that are considered to be the holiest places in the world of Islam. The purpose of their venture was to get an inside look at the radical movement by listening to what the Mullahs were preaching in regards to the political turmoil that was taking place in then British controlled Palestine
Palestine (mandate)
The British Mandate for Palestine, also known as the Palestine Mandate, The British Mandate of Palestine and the Mandate for Palestine, was a legal commission for the administration of Palestine, the draft of which was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922 and...
. Three years later The Great Uprising
Great Uprising
The 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine or Great Arab Revolt was a nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandate Palestine against British colonial rule and mass Jewish immigration.The revolt consisted of two distinct phases...
took form. This redoubled political violence was in part planned by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni
Mohammad Amin al-Husayni
Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in the British Mandate of Palestine. From as early as 1920, in order to secure the independence of Palestine as an Arab state he actively opposed Zionism, and was implicated as a leader of a violent riot...
, whom Van Paassen had interviewed in 1929 about his incitement of the bloody uprising that year against the Jews in Palestine.
Autobiographies
Van Paassen's autobiography, Days of Our Years, published in 1939, detailed many events that he couldn't mention in his earlier newspaper reports. It was the bestselling nonfiction book in the United States for almost two years. "Since I could not afford to be excluded from a single European country with so general an assignment, it was in my interest to remain on the good side of all the nascent censorships in Europe. Hence many things I investigated or saw remained unreported. For example, in 1928... [about] the methods of the reactionary governments of Rumania and Bulgaria in suppressing popular movements - twelve thousand peasants and workers had been slain in Bulgaria alone that year - I could not send out a word. The police dogged our every footstep.... The managing editor, Mr. John H. Tennant, warned me more than once that I had not been sent over on a crusading mission. He added, moreover, that there was no confirmation from any reliable source on that horrible business in Bulgaria. The local agency correspondents had not sent a word. So I, too, remained silent. It was the only policy. Correspondents like George SeldesGeorge Seldes
George Seldes was an American investigative journalist and media critic. The writer and critic Gilbert Seldes was his younger brother. Actress Marian Seldes is his niece....
, Samuel Spivak, David Darrah Gedye, and myself discovered only too soon that if we did speak out, we did not last very long, either in the countries in which we were stationed or in our jobs."
Van Paassen became a United States citizen in 1947.
In his 1964 book To Number Our Days, Van Paassen wrote more about many of the same subjects he covered in Days of Our Years, especially the maneuvers of pre-World War II Europe's empires. The book only slightly extends Van Paassen's account past the period before the U.S. entered the war, but includes much about his pre-war life as a roving correspondent. Van Paassen's views of the potential of the Soviet Union appear to have changed between 1939 and 1941, and here he writes less about Russia, and less optimistically about it, than in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s.
In his books Van Paassen was not a rigorous historian, but used vivid accounts often taken from first hand encounters with participants in the conflicts about which he wrote. During the 1929 Palestine uprising, after his reporting on the massacres contradicted both the Mufti's statements and local British officials' news releases, he became the target of several assassination attempts, after the last of which a Captain Saunders pointedly asked, "Moreover, why do these things happen to you? I have received no complaints from your colleagues of the press in Jerusalem." Subsequently he became persona non grata at Government House, but insisted that "I believe my offense was that I took nothing for granted.... I questioned everybody...".
Quotations from Van Paassen's Works
In 1938, before the Munich Accord, Van Paassen wrote of the Western European powers' strategic assessments of Germany's likely drive for expansion in Eastern Europe and Russia, and the potential shock to the European economy if the West were to make war and destroy Germany."On the other hand, against the evil of Germany's collapse stood the alternative of giving Adolf Hitler, under a Four-Power accord, carte blanche to break out of his dangerous isolation by clearing himself a road through Czechoslovakia to the oil and wheat fields of Rumania, thus putting him in possession of the wherewithal to risk a war of long duration with the Soviet Union. For it is Russia, which Herr Hitler, by a stroke of the pen, has relegated to Asia, that is to provide Germany with the markets and colonies she lacks at present. In this way Germany's pressure on the Western imperialisms will be lessened, and at the same time the intolerable burden of carrying the Reich's colossal war machine will be shifted, at least partially, from the shoulders of the German people to those of the prospective colonial tribes in the Muscovite plan.
"To prevent an interimperialist European war by coming to an understanding with Nazi ambition for expansion in Eastern Europe has been the fundamental directive of England's foreign policy under Baldwin and Chamberlain. Having her eyes on the Far East, where Japan has arisen as the next historical challenger of British naval and colonial power, Britain desires above all else to have her hands free for the struggle she must wage in the Pacific. For, as England in the past has successively destroyed the naval power of Spain, Holland, Louis XIV, Napoleonic France and Imperial Germany, she must sooner or later envisage checking Japan before her spheres of influence in China and her Indian, Malay, and Australian possessions are threatened by that new and determined rival.
"England will fight, therefore, not for democracy and not in Europe if she can at all prevent it, but to safeguard her imperial interests where they are at stake... in the East.
"...It could therefore be predicted with reasonable certainty after the smoothly effected annexation of Austria that Czechoslovakia would be the next link in the chain encircling Germany to be sacrificed, and, thereafter, that Poland, Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia are to be similarly abandoned when Hitler judges the time opportune to take another step in easterly direction."
Earlier, Germany's January 1936 commercial contracts for the output of the Spanish and Spanish Moroccan mines had gone awry with the opposition of a newly elected government in Madrid. "Even so, the need for raw materials was pressing. Germany's war stocks were of the scantiest. Rather than forgo the unlimited supply that the mines of Iberia and the Riff offered, Hitler summoned General Sanjurjo from Lisbon (where he was living in banishment) to Berlin in March 1936, and the plot for a military insurrection against the Republic with the aid of the Fuehrer and Signor Mussolini was hatched." After Sanjurjo's death his lieutenant, General Franco, duly launched the planned war from Morocco.
But the Prime Minister of France, Léon Blum
Léon Blum
André Léon Blum was a French politician, usually identified with the moderate left, and three times the Prime Minister of France.-First political experiences:...
, said that "...every time we make a move to help the Spanish Republic, we are warned by Downing Street that if we become involved in war with Italy and Germany over Spain, France cannot count on British support."
Van Paassen was convinced that the British Empire's farsighted military planners and political leaders were not entirely displeased to see France's position weakened by Germany at that time, as it improved Britain's relative dominance over its ancient rival, France, in Britain's drive for worldwide hegemony. "By his intervention in Spain, Herr Hitler, moreover, rendered Britain the immense service of laying an ax to the French military hegemony in Europe (which had been a thorn in Britain's side ever since Versailles
Treaty of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The other Central Powers on the German side of...
). By the creation of a third hostile frontier, he made the Quai d'Orsay so absolutely dependent on England that France lost her freedom of action entirely and was reduced to the status of a second-rate power..."
"In December 1936, Germany had the satisfaction of receiving the first shipments of iron ore from Spanish Morocco and a year later had not only the mines of the Asturias under her control, but had ordered Franco, in exchange for artillery tanks, Junker planes and ammunition, to have one million tons of ore, antimony, tin, copper and lignite in German ports by the end of 1939."
"In reality, the civil war in Spain strengthened Hitler so enormously that in the perspective of history that dolorous episode may well come to be known as the starting point of the Nazi mastery of Europe."
In 1941, Van Paassen wrote, "To many observers, amongst them a number of statesmen, the civil war in Spain at one time appeared to be nothing more significant than a bloody dispute between adherents of two equally obnoxious ideologies, Fascism and Communism. Whichever of the two contending parties came out victorious seemed, therefore, a matter of supreme indifference. Only in 1941 did it become clear that Franco's early victories in 1937 had laid the ground for Hitler's final blow to Great Britain's Mediterranean position in 1941."
At the same time he wrote, "The assumption that the Battle of the Atlantic is the pivot upon which world history turns is false. Britain as an empire stands or falls with the control of the Near East."
In "To Number Our Days" published in 1964, after viewing the plight of Blacks in Atlanta and after discussing President Franklin Roosevelt sympathetically as introducing "creeping socialism" (in the context as that term was understood in 1964), he notes that he made a prediction sealed in a vault at Oglethorpe University in 1942: "My prediction ran this way:...In AD 2042 when Oglethorpe's vault is opened, there will be a socialist president in Washington. He will be a Negro!" (p.248).
Books
- Nazism: An Assault on Civilization (1934; co-editor and contributor)
- Days of our Years (1939; autobiography)
- Afraid of Victory (c. 1939-41)
- The Battle for Jerusalem (1941; co-author with Vladimir Jabotinsky, John Henry PattersonJohn Henry Patterson (author)Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, DSO , known as J.H. Patterson, was an Anglo-Irish soldier, hunter, author and Zionist, best known for his book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo , which details his experiences while building a railway in Kenyain 1898-99...
, Josiah Wedgwood IVJosiah Wedgwood, 1st Baron WedgwoodColonel Josiah Clement Wedgwood, 1st Baron Wedgwood, DSO, PC, DL sometimes referred to as Josiah Wedgwood IV was a British Liberal and Labour politician who served in government under Ramsay MacDonald...
) - The Time is Now! (1941)
- That Day Alone (1941)
- The Forgotten Ally (1943)
- Earth Could Be Fair (1946)
- The Tower of Terzel (1948; novel)
- Palestine: Land of Israel (1948)
- Why Jesus Died (1949)
- Jerusalem Calling! (1950)
- Visions Rise and Change (1955)
- A Pilgrim's Vow (1956)
- A Crown of Fire: The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola (1960)
- To Number Our Days (1964)