William L. Shirer had a tumultuous but celebrated career—first as a newspaper foreign correspondent, then as a pioneering radio broadcaster and, finally, as an authority on Europe. He spent seven years reporting from Berlin, 1934 to 1941, getting a virtually unmatched look at the rise of Nazi Germany.

As author Ken Cuthbertson explains in his richly detailed biography A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century, Shirer was a competitive and astute journalist who suffered his share of career knocks, most notably when he lost his high-profile position as a CBS news commentator and later got unfairly labeled a communist sympathizer. He went 12 years without a job before reviving his fortunes, spectacularly, in 1960 when he produced his magnum opus, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It became a huge bestseller, cemented Shirer’s legacy—and enabled him to keep writing until his death, at age 89, in 1993.

Born in Chicago in 1904, Shirer attended Coe College, where he was editor in chief of the school newspaper. After graduation in 1925, he and a friend worked their way to Europe aboard a cattle ship. In France Shirer wangled a job as a copyeditor with the English-language Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune and soon after was covering sporting events and celebrity doings on the continent. A front-page story on Charles Lindbergh’s landing at Le Bourget Airport got him a promotion, at age 23, to foreign correspondent for the Tribune’s Foreign News Service. Thus began a life of “gabardine trench coats and late-night trains.”-Originally published in the December 2015 issue of American History magazine