Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour: 1939-1941 and Road to Victory: 1941-1945.

GILBERT, Martin [Winston S. Churchill].

Item Number: 143241

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984-1986.

First American edition, special signed limited issue of the sixth and seventh volumes in the official biography of Winston S. Churchill. Octavo, two volumes, original half cloth. Each volume is one of five hundred copies signed by the author. Volume II is a second printing. Each volume is fine in a fine dust jacket. Housed in a custom slipcase.

Volumes one and two of Churchill's official multivolume biography were written by his son, Randolph Churchill, who also edited the two companions to volume one. Gilbert's first work as official biographer was to supervise the posthumous publication of the three companions to volume two, but these were published in Randolph Churchill's name, and indeed, Randolph had already compiled most of the material in his lifetime. In 2008, Gilbert announced that the job of publishing the remaining companion volumes had been taken over by the Hillsdale Press, and the first of these appeared in 2014. The Hillsdale Press had already reprinted the complete biography in eight volumes and the sixteen published companion volumes, as a series titled "The Churchill Documents", so that the volume of 2014 became the seventeenth instalment of this series. Gilbert was incapacitated shortly after its publication, so that subsequent volumes were posthumously published by Gilbert's former research assistant Larry Arnn, with Gilbert credited as co-author.