Edwin Palmer Hoyt

Edwin Palmer Hoyt (August 5, 1923 – July 29, 2005) was a highly prolific American writer who specialized in military history. Until 1958 Hoyt worked in media. After 1958 he produced a consistent and large volume of non-fiction works.

Early life and career

Edwin Palmer Hoyt was born on August 5, 1923, in Portland, Oregon, to Edwin Palmer Hoyt (1897–1979) and his wife, the former Cecile DeVore (1901–1970). A younger brother, Charles Richard, was born in 1928. Hoyt attended the University of Oregon from 1940 to 1943.

In 1943, Hoyt's father, then the editor and publisher of The Oregonian, was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as the director of the Domestic Branch, Office of War Information. The younger Hoyt served with the Office of War Information during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. In 1945 and 1946, he served as a foreign correspondent for The Denver Post (of which his father became editor and publisher in 1946) and the United Press, reporting from locations in China, Thailand, Burma, India, the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Korea.

Hoyt subsequently worked as an ABC broadcaster, covering the 1948 revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Arab-Israeli conflict. From 1949 to 1951, he was the editor of the editorial page at The Denver Post. Hoyt was the editor and publisher of the Colorado Springs Free Press from 1951 to 1955, and an associate editor of Collier's Weekly in New York from 1955 to 1956. In 1957 he was a television producer and writer-director at CBS, and in 1958 he was an assistant publisher of American Heritage magazine in New York.

Starting in 1958, Hoyt was a full-time writer. In the 40 years since his first publication in 1960, he produced nearly 200 books. While Hoyt wrote about 20 novels, the vast majority of his works are biographies and other forms of non-fiction, with a heavy emphasis on military history, particularly World War II.

Hoyt died in Tokyo, Japan on July 29, 2005, after a prolonged illness. He is survived by his wife Hiroko, of Tokyo, and three children, Diana, Helga, and Christopher, all residing in the U.S.

Selected works

• Jumbos and Jackasses. NY: Doubleday (1960)
• One Penny Black: The Story of Stamp Collecting. Duell, Sloan & Pearce (1965)
• The last cruise of the Emden. London: Andre Deutsch (1967)
• The Army Without A Country. Macmillan: New York (1967)
• The American Attitude: The Story of the Making of Foreign Policy in the United States. Abelard (1970)
• Leyte Gulf: The Death of the Princeton, Lancer Books (1972)
• Blue Skies and Blood: The Battle of the Coral Sea. VT: Eriksson (1975)
• Guerilla: Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck and Germany's East African Empire. Macmillan (1981)
• The Pusan Perimeter, NY: Stein and Day (1984)
• On To The Yalu. NY: Stein and Day (1984) ISBN 0-8128-2977-8
• Japan's War: The Great Pacific Conflict, 1853 to 1952. NY: McGraw (1986)
• Hitler's War (1988) ISBN 0-07-030622-2
• The GI's War: The Story of American Soldiers in Europe in Ww II. McGraw-Hill (May 1988)
• The Rise of the Chinese Republic. McGraw-Hill (1989) ISBN 0-07-030619-2
• Hirohito: The Emperor and the Man. NY: Praeger (1992) ISBN 978-0-275-94069-0; OCLC 23766658
• Angels of Death" Goering's Luftwaffe. NY: Forge (1994)
• Mussolini's Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Fascist Vision. NY: John Wiley & Sons (1994)
• Inferno: The Firebombing of Japan, March 9 – August 15, 1945. Madison Books (2000) ISBN 978-1-56833-149-2
• The Last Kamikaze: The Story of Admiral Matome Ugaki. NY: Praeger (2008) ISBN 978-0-313-36065-7

References

• "Edwin P(almer) Hoyt, Jr." in Contemporary Authors Online (2009). Gale Publishing. Retrieved October 4, 2009.