In 1926, Walter Lord, nine years old, persuaded his mother to cross the Atlantic aboard the Olympic. The choice was no accident; the Olympic was sister ship to the Titanic and already the doomed White Star liner sailed in and out of young Lord"s imagination. The following year, he wrote and illustrated an account of how the Titanic sank in the early morning hours of April 14, 1912 with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. Classmates at the Gilman School in Baltimore and later at Princeton and at Yale Law School, as well as colleagues in the Office of Strategic Services during the war, and even associates in his post-war jobs in journalism and advertising remember Lord"s fascination with the disaster. In retrospect it seems inevitable that the Titanic would be the subject of his foray into book-writing. In July 1954, while a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson, he proposed the book to his friend Howard Cady who was an editor at Henry Holt Publishers. A Night to Remember was an immediate...