Michael Korda

[1] Korda grew up in the UK but received part of his education in France where his father had worked with film director Marcel Pagnol.

[1] Korda moved to New York City in 1957 where he worked for playwright Sidney Kingsley as a research assistant and then later as a freelance reader in the CBS story department.

[1] One of the first books Korda bought was The Forest People by Colin Turnbull—a memoir of Turnbull's time living with the Mbuti Pygmies in the then Belgian Congo.

In the mid-sixties Korda began to write freelance articles for Glamour magazine and eventually wrote their film review column for almost ten years.

[1] Korda also wrote for Clay Felker's New York magazine including a piece that eventually became his first book, Male Chauvinism and How it Works at Home and in the Office.

[1] Among Korda's other books are Charmed Lives, which is the story of his father and his two uncles, and the novel Queenie, which is a roman à clef about his aunt, actress Merle Oberon, which was later adapted into a television miniseries.

Korda said he felt that Charmed Lives was the book he was born to write, "as if I had been observing and storing up memories with just that purpose in mind for years.

"[1] Beginning in the 2000s, Korda wrote a number of history and biography books on the Hungarian Revolution, Dwight Eisenhower, T. E. Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.