Idealist
Wendell Willkie's Wartime Quest to Build One World
Winner of the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize
“The Idealist is a powerful book, gorgeously written and consistently insightful. Samuel Zipp uses the 1942 world tour of Wendell Willkie to examine American attitudes toward internationalism, decolonization, and race in the febrile atmosphere of the world’s first truly global conflict.”
—Andrew Preston, author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith
A dramatic account of the plane journey undertaken by businessman-turned-maverick-internationalist Wendell Willkie to rally US allies to the war effort. Willkie’s tour of a planet shrunk by aviation and war inspired him to challenge Americans to fight a rising tide of nationalism at home.
In August 1942, as the threat of fascism swept the world, a charismatic Republican presidential contender boarded the Gulliver at…
Samuel Zipp is a writer and historian. He is the author of the award-winning Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York, which tells the larger history of the battles around urban renewal that propelled Jane Jacobs to national fame. He has written articles and reviews on urbanism and culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation. He is currently associate professor of American studies and urban studies at Brown University.
Idealist
Samuel Zipp