Walter Lord, the author whose book “A Night to Remember” is credited with starting the world’s enduring obsession with the sinking of the Titanic, died Sunday in his New York apartment. He was 84.
His fascination with the disaster that plunged the steamship to the bottom of the Atlantic on April 15, 1912, with a loss of 1,500 lives began in his youth.
Mr. Lord’s first knowledge of the disaster came in 1926, when he and his mother sailed aboard the RMS Olympic, the Titanic’s sister ship, from New York for a European vacation.
A year later, while spending a rainy summer afternoon exploring an aunt’s library, he noticed a thin black volume. It was “The Loss of the S.S. Titanic,” an eyewitness account by a passenger, Lawrence Beesely.
“I was hooked. That was the book that caused all the trouble,” he told The Baltimore Sun in a 1998 interview.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1939 from Princeton, where he majored in American and modern European history. He attended law school at Yale until the beginning of World War II, when he joined the Army’s Office of Strategic Services.
He then returned to Yale, earned his law degree and moved to New York, where he abandoned thoughts of a legal career for the life of an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson agency.
A literary friend suggested he pursue his interest in the Titanic disaster, an event that had been overshadowed by two world wars and the Depression and largely forgotten.
Mr. Lord began tracking down 63 survivors and became even more hooked by the great drama of the liner’s sinking.
Published in 1955, the book has never been out of print and is one of his 13 best sellers.
Others are “The Dawn’s Early Light,” concentrating on the 1814 Battle of Baltimore; “The Day of Infamy” (1957), about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; “Incredible Victory” (1967), which detailed the Battle of Midway, and “The Past That Would Not Die” (1968), the story of James Meredith, whose integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962 was accompanied by rioting and bloodshed.
“A Night to Remember” twice was made into motion pictures and has spawned endless documentaries, books, television specials and scientific explorations of the wreckage.
Mr. Lord, who was born John Walter Lord Jr. in Baltimore, was a bachelor and had no immediate survivors.
