Winston Churchill (1871-1947) was an American novelist. He attended Smith Academy in Missouri and the United States Naval Academy, where he graduated in 1894 and became an editor of the Army and Navy Journal. He resigned from the navy to pursue a writing career. While it is claimed that his first novel was The Celebrity, published in 1898, a question arises where his novel called Mr. Keegan's Elopement should be placed, because it was published two years earlier in (1896) within a magazine. Later in 1903 it was republished as an illustrated hardback book. His next novel called Richard Carvel, was published the next year. It was a phenomenon, literally selling by the box-car as many as two million copies in a nation of only seventy- six million, and that book made Churchill rich. His next two novels, The Crisis (1901) and The Crossing (1904), were also very successful. In 1917, he toured the battlefields of World War I and wrote about what he saw, his first non-fiction work. Sometime after this move, he took up watercolours, and also became known for his landscapes.