A Night To Remember Sinking

1955 non-fiction book by Walter Lord

A Nighttime to Remember (Titanic)
1955 American first edition cover
Writer	Walter Lord
Land	United States
Linguistic communication	English
Subject	Sinking of the RMS Titanic
Genre	History-Non Fiction
Publisher	R & West Holt
Publication engagement	November 1955
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	963
ISBN	0-03-027615-two (hardback edition)
OCLC	1075502
Followed past	The Nighttime Lives On

A Night to Recall is a 1955 non-fiction book past Walter Lord that depicts the sinking of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912. The book was hugely successful, and is nonetheless considered a definitive resource about the Titanic. Lord interviewed 63 survivors of the disaster likewise as drawing on books, memoirs, and articles that they had written. In 1986, Lord authored his follow-up book, The Night Lives On, following renewed interest in the story after the wreck of the Titanic was discovered by Robert Ballard.

The film based on the book and with advice from Lord, was released in 1958. Lord too served as a consultant to Canadian film director James Cameron while he was making his film Titanic in 1997.

Publication history [edit]

Lord traveled on the RMS Olympic, Titanic 'due south sister ship, when he was a boy and the experience gave him a lifelong fascination with the lost liner.^[i] Every bit he later put it, he spent his time on the Olympic "prowling around" and trying to imagine "such a huge thing" sinking. He started reading about and drawing Titanic at the age of ten and spent many years collecting Titanic memorabilia, causing people to "have note of this oddity."^[two] He majored in history at Princeton University and graduated from Yale Law School earlier joining the New York-based advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.^[2] Writing in his spare fourth dimension, he interviewed 63 survivors of the disaster.^[3]

A Nighttime to Remember was simply Lord'southward second book but was a huge success, thanks in no small function to the aggressive advertizement campaign carried out by R & West Holt following its launch in November 1955. The book also undoubtedly benefited from the popularity of the 1953 film Titanic and other coverage of the disaster that was published around the same time.^[2] Within two months of its publication, the book had sold 60,000 copies and remained listed as a best-seller for six months. The Ladies' Abode Periodical and Reader's Assimilate both published condensed versions and information technology was selected in June 1956 past the Book of the Month Club. The first paperback edition was published by Bantam Books in October 1956.^[four]

Since then the book has never been out of print and has been translated into over a dozen languages. Its success enabled Lord to leave the world of advertizing and become a total-time writer.^[4] Later the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in 1985 sparked a new moving ridge of public interest in the disaster he wrote a follow-upwards book, The Night Lives On (1986). Daniel Allen Butler comments that "although it was of immense interest to Titanic buffs the earth over, it lacked the spark of the original,"^[iii] which by 1998 had reached its fiftieth printing.^[5]

[edit]

The book received widespread praise from contemporary critics. The New York Times called it "stunning ... ane of the well-nigh exciting books of this or whatever other yr".^{[half dozen]} The Atlantic Monthly praised the volume for doing "a magnificent chore of re-creative chronicling, enthralling from the first word to the concluding."^[six] Entertainment Weekly said that it was "seamless and adept... it'due south clear why this is many a researcher'south Titanic bible", while The states Today described it as "the most riveting narrative of the disaster."^[6]

The surreptitious to Lord'due south success, according to the New York Herald Tribune 's critic Stanley Walker, was that he used "a kind of literary pointillism, the arrangement of contrasting bits of fact and emotion in such a fashion that a vividly existent impression of an outcome is conveyed to the reader."^[six] Walker highlighted the way that Lord had avoided telling the story through the prism of social grade, which had been the usual manner of previous narratives, and instead successfully depicted the human element of the story past showing how those aboard reacted to the disaster whatever their class.^[vi]

Steven Biel, an American cultural historian, notes the novelistic way in which Lord tells the story. The volume depicts events through the eyes of multiple individuals, violating simple chronology to present an overlapping serial of narratives. Nathaniel Philbrick, writing in the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of A Night to Recall, notes that at the time of publication it was the showtime pregnant book about Titanic for nearly forty years. He argues that the book's hallmarks are its restraint, brevity and readability, which downplays the extravagant and mythical aspects of the disaster and instead puts in the foreground the stories of the people on the transport. The narrative builds suspense, making the reader care almost the characters and revisit the disaster from their perspective.^[7] Information technology tells the story in a highly visual and audible way, describing the sights and sounds of the night of the disaster "with the immediacy of a live circulate or a idiot box documentary", equally Biel puts it.^[5]

A cardinal to Lord's method is his technique of adopting an unconventional arroyo to the chronology of the result, "[taking] an imaginative approach to fourth dimension and space in which hours and minutes prove extremely malleable, the ship itself seems nearly infinitely complex, and the disaster assumes club and unity from far away."^[8] In brusk information technology is "a modernist narrative [constructed] effectually a modernist event."^[8] Reviewers highlighted the way in which Lord depicted the man side of the Titanic story, which The New York Times chosen "the cadre of Mr. Lord'south account, and explains its fascination, a pull as powerful in its way as the last downwards plunge of the ship itself."^[9] While the "legendary acts of gallantry" stood out, the book invites readers to put themselves in the identify of those aboard and implicitly asks how they would react in the aforementioned situation.^[10] Equally Newsweek put it, "What would information technology be like to be aboard a sinking sea liner?"^[10]

The significance of Lord's volume, co-ordinate to Biel, is that information technology "gave the disaster its fullest retelling since 1912 and made it speak to a modern mass audience and a new prepare of postwar concerns. In the creation of the Titanic myth there were ii defining moments: 1912, of course, and 1955."^[xi] Lord updates the popular interpretation of the Titanic disaster by portraying it in globe-historical terms as the symbolic and actual stop of an era, and every bit an event which "marked the terminate of a general feeling of confidence." Dubiousness replaced orderliness, and the transport's sinking marked the beginning of the twentieth century'southward "unending sequence of disillusionment. Before the Titanic, all was quiet. Afterward, all was tumult."^[12] Biel notes that Lord'southward underlying theme is a rather nostalgic reflection of the "nobler instincts" exhibited in the disaster and their subsequent eclipse. Such ethics were attractive for a mail-state of war guild that historic the office of the nuclear family and the traditional roles of the male breadwinner and female homemaker.^[12]

Lord's invocation of an era of confidence and certainty was also a relevant theme at the height of the Cold War.^[12] The University of California sociologist Fred Davis comments that nostalgia "thrives ... on the rude transitions wrought by such phenomena as war, depression, civil disturbance, and cataclysmic natural disasters – in short, those events that cause masses of people to feel uneasy and to wonder whether the world and their being are quite what they always took them to be."^[xiii] The turmoil and uncertainty of the early Atomic Age and the onset of profound social changes made the old concepts of the nuclear family and traditional gender roles, reflected in the behaviour of Titanic 's passengers, resonate with a mid-1950s audience.^[fourteen]

The gradual nature of the disaster was also more than comforting, in some respects, compared with the nature of modern technological failures such as air crashes. Time 's reviewer fabricated this betoken explicitly: "This air age, when death comes likewise swiftly for heroism or with no survivors to record it, tin yet plough with wonder to an age earlier yesterday when a thousand deaths at sea seemed the very worst the world must suffer."^[15] Information technology was, as Steven Biel comments, "a quainter kind of disaster" in which the victims had fourth dimension to gear up and chose how to die.^[14]

Screen adaptations [edit]

The book has been adapted twice for the screen. The starting time production, A Night to Recall (1956), was staged as a live accommodation screened on 28 March 1956 by NBC Television and sponsored by Kraft Foods as part of the Kraft Television Theatre program.^[16] It has been described equally "the biggest, well-nigh lavish, most expensive thing of its kind" attempted up to that signal, with 31 sets, 107 actors, 72 speaking parts, 3,000 gallons of water and costing $95,000 ($946,860.5 at nowadays-solar day prices). George Roy Hill directed and Claude Rains provided a narration^[5] – a practise borrowed from radio dramas which provided a template for many boob tube dramas of the time.^[17] It took a similar approach to the volume, lacking dominant characters and switching between a multiplicity of scenes. Rains' narration was used "to bridge the most limitless number of sequences of life aboard the doomed liner", as a reviewer put information technology,^[xviii] and closed with his announcement that "never again has Man been so confident. An age had come to an terminate."^[xix] The production was a major hit, alluring 28 1000000 viewers, and greatly additional the book'south sales.^[5] It was rerun on kinescope on 2 May 1956, five weeks afterward its get-go broadcast.^[16] ^[twenty]

The second adaptation was the 1958 British drama film A Night to Recall starring Kenneth More, which is all the same widely regarded as "the definitive cinematic telling of the story."^[21] The pic came about after its eventual director, Roy Ward Baker, and its producer, Belfast-built-in William MacQuitty both caused copies of the volume – Baker from his favorite bookshop and MacQuitty from his married woman – and decided to obtain the film rights. MacQuitty had really seen Titanic being launched on 31 May 1911 and still remembered the occasion vividly.^[22] He met Lord and brought him on board the production as a consultant.^[23] The moving picture diverges from both the book and the NBC TV adaptation in focusing on a central character, Second Officer Charles Lightoller, played past Moore. Its conclusion reflects Lord's earth-historical theme of a "world changed for ever" with a fictional conversation betwixt Lightoller and Colonel Archibald Gracie, sitting on a lifeboat. Lightoller declares that the disaster is "unlike ... Considering nosotros were so sure. Because even though information technology'southward happened, it's notwithstanding unbelievable. I don't remember I'll e'er feel sure again. Nearly anything."^[19]

Collection [edit]

Later Lord died in 2002, he ancestral to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England his huge drove of manuscripts, original messages and Titanic memorabilia, which he had gathered during his life and used to write A Night to Remember. MacQuitty also donated items from his own collection of material related to the motion picture. Items from the collection are on display at the museum and can be accessed by researchers.^[24]

References [edit]

^ Welshman 2012, p. 281.
^ ^a ^b ^c Biel 1996, p. 150.
^ ^a ^b Butler 1998, p. 208.
^ ^a ^b Welshman 2012, pp. 281–282.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Biel 1996, p. 151.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Welshman 2012, p. 282.
^ Welshman 2012, pp. 283–284.
^ ^a ^b Biel 1996, p. 152.
^ Biel 1996, p. 156.
^ ^a ^b Biel 1996, pp. 156–157.
^ Biel 1996, p. 149.
^ ^a ^b ^c Biel 1996, p. 155.
^ Davis 1979, p. 49.
^ ^a ^b Biel 1996, p. 157.
^ Biel 1996, p. 158.
^ ^a ^b Anderson 2005, p. 97.
^ Anderson 2005, p. 98.
^ Biel 1996, p. 160.
^ ^a ^b Biel 1996, p. 161.
^ Rasor 2001, p. 119.
^ Heyer 2012, p. 104.
^ Mayer 2004, p. 31.
^ Heyer 2012, p. 149.
^ National Maritime Museum & seven April 2003.

Bibliography [edit]

Anderson, D. Brian (2005). The Titanic in Print and on Screen. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. ISBN0-7864-1786-2.
Biel, Steven (1996). Down with the Old Canoe . London: West.W. Norton & Visitor. ISBN0-393-03965-X.
Butler, Daniel Allen (1998). Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic . Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books. ISBN978-0-8117-1814-1. Butler, Daniel (1998). Unsinkable: the full story of the RMS Titanic.
Davis, Fred (1979). Yearning for Yesterday: A Folklore of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press.
Heyer, Paul (2012). Titanic Century: Media, Myth, and the Making of a Cultural Icon. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. ISBN978-0-313-39815-5.
Mayer, Geoff (2004). Roy Ward Baker. Manchester University Press. ISBN978-0-7190-6354-1.
Rasor, Eugene 50. (2001). The Titanic: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Grouping. ISBN978-0-313-31215-1.
Welshman, John (2012). Titanic: The Last Dark of a Small Town . Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-161173-5.
"National Maritime Museum receives historic Titanic archive: the Lord-Macquitty Collection". National Maritime Museum. 7 April 2003. Archived from the original on 14 April 2012. Retrieved six Apr 2012.