![]() Ī key to Lord's method is his technique of adopting an unconventional approach to the chronology of the event, " an imaginative approach to time and space in which hours and minutes prove extremely malleable, the ship itself seems almost infinitely complex, and the disaster assumes order and unity from far away." In short it is "a modernist narrative around a modernist event." Reviewers highlighted the way in which Lord depicted the human side of the Titanic story, which The New York Times called "the core of Mr. It tells the story in a highly visual and aural way, describing the sights and sounds of the night of the disaster "with the immediacy of a live broadcast or a television documentary", as Biel puts it. The narrative builds suspense, making the reader care about the characters and revisit the disaster from their perspective. He argues that the book's hallmarks are its restraint, brevity and readability, which downplays the extravagant and mythical aspects of the disaster and instead puts in the foreground the stories of the people on the ship. Nathaniel Philbrick, writing in the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of A Night to Remember, notes that at the time of publication it was the first significant book about Titanic for nearly forty years. The book depicts events through the eyes of multiple individuals, violating simple chronology to present an overlapping series of narratives. Steven Biel, an American cultural historian, notes the novelistic way in which Lord tells the story. The secret to Lord's success, according to the New York Herald Tribune 's critic Stanley Walker, was that he used "a kind of literary pointillism, the arrangement of contrasting bits of fact and emotion in such a fashion that a vividly real impression of an event is conveyed to the reader." Walker highlighted the way that Lord had avoided telling the story through the prism of social class, which had been the usual style of previous narratives, and instead successfully depicted the human element of the story by showing how those aboard reacted to the disaster whatever their class. it's clear why this is many a researcher's Titanic bible", while USA Today described it as "the most riveting narrative of the disaster." ![]() The Atlantic Monthly praised the book for doing "a magnificent job of re-creative chronicling, enthralling from the first word to the last." Entertainment Weekly said that it was "seamless and skillful. one of the most exciting books of this or any other year". The book received widespread praise from contemporary critics. Daniel Allen Butler comments that "although it was of immense interest to Titanic buffs the world over, it lacked the spark of the original," which by 1998 had reached its fiftieth printing. After the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in 1985 sparked a new wave of public interest in the disaster he wrote a follow-up book, The Night Lives On (1986). Its success enabled Lord to leave the world of advertising and become a full-time writer. Since then the book has never been out of print and has been translated into over a dozen languages. The first paperback edition was published by Bantam Books in October 1956. The Ladies' Home Journal and Reader's Digest both published condensed versions and it was selected in June 1956 by the Book of the Month Club. Within two months of its publication, the book had sold 60,000 copies and remained listed as a best-seller for six months. The book also undoubtedly benefited from the popularity of the 1953 film Titanic and other coverage of the disaster that was published around the same time. Ī Night to Remember was only Lord’s second book but was a huge success, thanks in no small part to the aggressive advertising campaign carried out by R & W Holt following its launch in November 1955. Writing in his spare time, he interviewed 63 survivors of the disaster. He started reading about and drawing Titanic at the age of ten and spent many years collecting Titanic memorabilia, causing people to "take note of this oddity." He majored in history at Princeton University and graduated from Yale Law School before joining the New York-based advertising agency J. As he later put it, he spent his time on the Olympic "prowling around" and trying to imagine "such a huge thing" sinking. Publication history Lord traveled on the RMS Olympic, Titanic 's sister ship, when he was a boy and the experience gave him a lifelong fascination with the lost liner.
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