His works span numerous literary genres, including mystery, romance, historical fiction, biography, and journalism.
Born in a suburb of Manchester, England in 1930, Weatherby first travelled to the United States in the late 1950s as an entertainment correspondent and feature writer for The Guardian[1] before being assigned to report on the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s.
[2] While covering the movement, he began a relationship with an African American man named Christine, and the couple travelled together throughout Louisiana, Georgia, and New York.
[2] In the 1970s, he worked as a senior editor at the publishing company Farrar, Straus & Giroux,[2] and in 1976, he published Conversations with Marilyn, an account of his discussions and experiences with Marilyn Monroe during the filming of what would be her final completed movie, The Misfits (1961); Weatherby had briefly acted as a confidante of Monroe's during his time as an entertainment reporter in the early 1960s.
[5] Weatherby published a number of other books regarding the lives of influential people, including a 1989 biography of his close friend, James Baldwin.