Cornelius Ryan(1920–1974)

Cornelius John Ryan was born at Heytesbury Street in south Dublin on 5 June 1920, son of a clerk in the Dublin city corporation. He was schooled at the Christian Brothers' Synge Street School and was the senior student violinist of its orchestra before moving to London in 1940, at twenty, to take a reporter's job on the Daily Telegraph.

The war put him on the European beat. Assigned to the United States Eighth Air Force at the East Anglian bomber bases in 1943, he flew fourteen combat missions as an air-correspondent on B-17 Flying Fortresses over Germany. He transferred to Reuters in 1944, was attached to the Allied Expeditionary Force for the Normandy landings, and came ashore on Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944, filing the first Allied wire-service report from the beach.

He moved to the United States in 1947, became an American citizen in 1951, and joined Collier's magazine in 1952. The assignment that ran the rest of his life came in 1956: the existing histories of Normandy were almost all written from the commander's office and almost none from the soldier's foxhole, and he set out to write a popular history of D-Day built the other way, by tracking down every surviving participant he could find and taking the first-person testimony.

The Longest Day (1959) was the result of three years and six thousand interviews, compiled with a research team across Europe and the United States from about three thousand American, British, Canadian, French, Dutch, Polish and German survivors. Published in January 1959, it sold ten million copies, was translated into eighteen languages, and gave post-war popular history its foundational template. The 1962 Darryl Zanuck film adaptation, with an eighteen-language ensemble cast, was the largest-budget non-musical Hollywood production of its decade.

He wrote two further volumes on the same method: The Last Battle (1966), the Berlin endgame of 1945, and A Bridge Too Far (1974), on Operation Market Garden, finished against the clock and published two weeks before his death. He died in New York on 23 November 1974, fifty-four years old; the Richard Attenborough film of A Bridge Too Far followed in 1977, and the Overseas Press Club of America established the Cornelius Ryan Award in his memory. The Ryan name, the patronymic Ó Maoilriain and the most common surname in south-east Ireland, he carried from a Dublin clerk's family into the founding generation of post-war Anglo-American popular history.