- William L. Shirer was born on February 23, 1904 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer, known for Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years (1960), The Nightmare Years (1989) and The Magic Face (1951). He was married to Tess Shirer. He died on December 28, 1993 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
- SpouseTess Shirer(January 31, 1931 - July 1970) (divorced, 2 children)
- Graduate of Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1925).
- Was CBS' pointman inside Nazi Germany during the period leading up to World War Two, and reported on a number of pivotal events within Europe, including a broadcast from the Compiègne Forest of the French surrender in June, 1940.
- After the war, he was given unprecedented access to captured German documents, documents that he used to write the first comprehensive history of the Adolf Hitler years, "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich".
- Lost all sight in his right eye due to a 1931 skiing accident.
- Took a year off work in 1933, living with his wife, Tess, in a Catalan fishing village on the Spanish coast.
- [His account with Mahatma Gandhi during 1930 - 1931] I count the days with Mohandas K. Gandhi the most fruitful of my life. No other experience was as inspiring and as meaningful and as lasting. No other shook me out of the rut of banal existence and opened my ordinary mind and spirit to some conception of the meaning of life on this perplexing Earth.
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