John Tracy Winterich papers (Ms.Winterich)

Biographical note

John Tracy Winterich was born in Middletown, Connecticut on 25 May 1891, grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and graduated from Brown University in 1912. After serving as an assistant faculty member in the English Department at Brown in 1912-13, he became a reporter and copy editor for the Springfield Republican .

During World War I, Winterich became one of the first members of the editorial staff of the Army newspaper The Stars and Stripes , about which he wrote an informal history titled Squads Write! (1931). After the war, he joined the staff of The American Legion Weekly , serving as editor of the publication (which became The American Legion Monthly in 1926) from 1924 to 1938, and following this, was on the editorial board of The Colophon and The Dolphin magazines, and on the staff of PM magazine. During World War II, he served as a colonel at the Pentagon dealing with problems of censorship, and afterwards was briefly managing editor of The Saturday Review before becoming contributing editor. For a time, he was also on the staff of The New Yorker .

Winterich had an extensive collection of first editions, and wrote various works on book collecting and printing such as A Primer of Book Collecting (1927), Early American Books and Printing (1935), and The Grolier Club, 1884-1950: An Informal History (1950, revised edition 1967), as well as a memoir of growing up in Providence titled Another Day, Another Dollar (1947). He died aged 79 in Springfield, Massachusetts on 15 August 1970.

Source: New York Times , 17 August 1970, p. 27. Retrieved 27 May 2020.