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Ward Swift Just

Born: 1935 in Michigan City, Indiana
Pen Name: Ward S. Just, Ward Just

Connection to Illinois: Just was raised in Waukegan, In 1946, the family moved to Lake Forest.

Biography: Ward Swift Just is a writer. He is the son and grandson of newspaper publishers, and the great grandson of Chicago mayor George B. Swift. From the time he was 14 years old, he worked summers at the family newspaper, ''The Waukegan News-Sun''. After attending Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, he returned to the family newspaper as a reporter. In 1959, he joined the Chicago bureau of Newsweek, and went on the bureaus in Washington and London. In 1965, he joined ''The Washington Post'' and became its Saigon correspondent later that year. He returned to Washington as a political reporter for the newspaper in 1967 and, in 1968, he became an editorial writer. The following year, he left the newspaper business with the intention of writing fiction. Since then, he has written many novels, collections of short stories, a play, a memoir, and a study of the United States Army. His work is also widely anthologized and has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Russian. He currently resides in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts.


Awards:
  • '''''An Unfinished Season'''''
  • -- Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2005
  • -- American Heartland Prize for fiction, Chicago Tribune '''''Echo House'''''
  • -- Finalist, National Book Award, 1997 ''' ''A Dangerous Friend'''''
  • -- Finalist, PEN/Hemingway Award, 1999

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

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Ward Swift Just on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=ward+swift+just


Selected Titles

A dangerous friend /
ISBN: 061805670x OCLC: 300568088

Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston : 1999.

An idealistic political scientist abandons his family to bring progress to 1965 Vietnam, only to wreck havoc with people's lives. Sydney Parade of Connecticut is unaware that the foundation employing him is a front for the Pentagon. By the author of Echo House.

  A family trust :
ISBN: 0316477230 OCLC: 3481487

Little, Brown, Boston : ©1978.

The passing of Amos Rising, town elder and editor of The Dement Intelligencer, leaves the Rising family without a patriarch and the town with a hole in its center. The ambitions and talents of the Risings, the changing face of the town and the life of the spirited, intelligent, and attractive Dana Rising fill the pages of this extraordinary novel. Ward Just's A Family Trust is about the public face and private souls of America's Heartland in the same way his other novels are about Germany, Vietnam, or Washington D.C.

A soldier of the revolution /
ISBN: 1586480979 OCLC: 48706551

PublicAffairs, New York : 2002.

Ambition & love /
ISBN: 0395681960 OCLC: 29184960

Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston : 1994.

The story of an artist who refuses to sell her soul. Georgia Whyte could have had success painting what was popular, instead she sticks to her ideals and it pays off. It also helps her find love. The story is told through the eyes of a slightly cynical, but admiring mystery writer who runs into her in Paris. By the author of The Translator.

  American romantic /
ISBN: 0544538676 OCLC: 885225634

Mariner Books, [Boston] : 2015.

While on duty as a young foreign service officer in Indochina in the 1960s, Harry Sanders briefly meets a young German woman who changes the course of his life.

An unfinished season /
ISBN: 061856828x OCLC: 60593519

"Set in Eisenhower-era Chicago, 'An Unfinished Season' brilliantly evokes a city, an epoch, and a shift in ideals through the closely observed story of nineteen-year-old Wilson Ravan. In his summer before college, Wils finds himself straddling three worlds; the working-class newsroom where he's landed a coveted job, the whirl of glittering North Shore debutante parties where he spends his nights, and the growing cold war between his parents at home. With unparalleled grace, Ward Just brings Wils's circle to radiant life. Through his finely wrought portraits of a father and son, young lovers, and newsroom dramas, Just also stirringly depicts an American Political era."--Jacket.

Echo House /
ISBN: 0395901383 OCLC: 35762712

Three generations of the Behls, a politically ambitious family in Washington. The three men are Adolph, a senator during the 1930s and failed vice-president; his son, Axel, a World War II OSS agent and later a Cold War warrior; and Alec a successful lawyer and lobbyist during the reign of President Kennedy. By the author of Ambition and Love.

Exiles in the garden
ISBN: 9780547195582 OCLC: 276406168

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston : 2009.

Settling in Georgetown after rejecting his family's life in politics, newspaper photographer Alec witnesses the émigré gatherings at the home of his next-door neighbors and watches the disintegration of his marriage upon his refusal of an assignment inVietnam.

Forgetfulness /
ISBN: 0618918493 OCLC: 759581322

Houyghton Mifflin Co., Boston, MA : 2007.

A former spy for the CIA now living as a respected painter in the south of France, Thomas Railles finds his life turned upside down when his wife Florette is murdered, until he discovers that four Moroccan terrorists have been charged with the crime.

Honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women /
ISBN: 0525126759 OCLC: 4775951

Dutton, New York : ©1979.

In the city of fear /
ISBN: 0670396796 OCLC: 8346813

Viking Press, New York : 1982.

Lowell Limpett :
ISBN: 1586480871 OCLC: 46976528

Public Affairs, New York : ©2001.

Lowell Limpett is a play about a journalist at the end of his career. The two short stories are about the players in the politics of Washington, D.C.

Military men
ISBN: 0394436172 OCLC: 111389

Knopf, New York, 1970.

Rodin's debutante
ISBN: 9780547504193 OCLC: 651911299

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston : 2011.

Young Lee Goodell's life decisions--to become a sculptor, to sojourn in the mean streets of the South Side, to marry into the haute-intellectual culture of Hyde Park--play out against the crude glamour of midcentury Chicago and the meaning of his four years at Ogden Hall School.

The American ambassador /
ISBN: 0618340785 OCLC: 14069836

Houghton Mifflin, Boston : 1987.

William North is a devoted father and a successful foreign service officer who has spent many years abroad in service to his country. But his son, given every opportunity in life, has turned his back on father and fatherland and joined a West German terrorist organization.

The American blues /
ISBN: 0670117129 OCLC: 10146306

Viking Press, New York : 1984.

The congressman who loved Flaubert :
ISBN: 0395901375 OCLC: 38739030

A Mariner Book, Boston : 1998.

The Eastern Shore /
ISBN: 0544836588 OCLC: 932050784

"From an American master comes another "beautifully languid, emotionally intense tale" (Entertainment Weekly), this time of a newspaper editor's fateful decision to expose a small-town fugitive. Ned Ayres, the son of a judge in an Indiana town in midcentury America, has never wanted anything but a newspaper career--in his father's appalled view, a "junk business," a way of avoiding responsibility. The defining moment comes early, when Ned is city editor of his hometown paper. One of his beat reporters fields a tip: William Grant, the town haberdasher, married to the bank president's daughter and father of two children, once served six years in Joliet. The story runs--Ned offers no resistance to his publisher's argument that the public has a right to know. The consequences, swift and shocking, haunt him throughout a long career, as he moves first to Chicago, where he engages in a spirited love affair that cannot, in the end, compete with the pull of the newsroom--"never lonely, especially when it was empty"--And the "subtle beauty" of the front page. Finally, as the editor of a major newspaper in post-Kennedy-era Washington, DC, Ned has reason to return to the question of privacy and its many violations--the gorgeously limned themes running through Ward Just's elegiac and masterly new novel"--

The translator
ISBN: 0395571685 OCLC: 23384775

Houghton Mifflin, Boston : 1991.

An old friend betrays linguist Sydney Van Damm by revealing his language skills to intelligence sources who are trying to create a new Eastern Europe out of the remnants of the old communist order.

The translator.
ISBN: 0395957664 OCLC: 77575636

Houghton Mifflin, Boston : 1999.

The weather in Berlin /
ISBN: 0618340793 OCLC: 48451084

Houghton Mifflin, Boston : 2002.

Tired of the studio intrigues of Hollywood, film director Dixon Greenwood heads for post-war Germany and becomes involved in the production of a television program that reunites him with an actress with whom he had worked thirty years before.

Twenty-one :
ISBN: 0395537568 OCLC: 20723070

Houghton Mifflin, Boston : 1990.

 

 

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