Alfred Lansing

Ten of the men who came back from Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition sat down with Alfred Lansing and told him what had happened to them. He read the private diaries of eight more, then wrote the twenty months of pack ice, open boats and the crossing to South Georgia at the pace of a thriller, with almost nothing invented. Lansing was born in Chicago in 1921, served in the US Navy during the Second World War and received a Purple Heart, then studied journalism at Northwestern University. He reported for United Press, wrote freelance afterwards, settled at Bethel, Connecticut, and died there in 1975 at fifty-four.