He is best known for a biography of Adolf Hitler[2] and a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II-era Japan, The Rising Sun.

He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1932 and from Williams College in 1936 and attended the Yale School of Drama for a time.

[1] At one point he managed to get an article on dirigibles into LOOK magazine; it proved extremely popular and led to his career as a historian.

[1] His most important work may be The Rising Sun (Random House, 1970), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1971.

It won the Pulitzer because it was the first book in English to tell the history of the Pacific War from the Japanese point of view, rather than the prevailing American one.