My Own, My Country's Time: A Journalist's Journey

by Vermont Royster

My Own, My Country's Time: A Journalist's Journey, by Royster, Vermont This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0912697024
• ISBN13: 9780912697024
• Release Date: October 1983
• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
• Length: 351 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A slide downhill

In this autobiography, Vermont Royster (1914-1996), late editor of the Wall Street Journal, notes that when he published personal thoughts about small matters they would bring in "far more letters than a more `significant' column on a major political issue." That same hierarchy seems true of the book itself. Royster's commentary on his childhood and youth is full of engaging detail, whereas his comments about the influential politicians he interviewed at the height of his career seem commonplace by comparison. So the book draws the reader in with its careful prose and good humor and then eventually disappoints because the original tone can't be maintained. A further problem is that Royster, a moderate conservative, has no religious, and few philosophical, anchors for his editorial positions-or at least few he cares to share with the reader.

An Eloquent Memoir from a greatly underrated journalist!

Vermont Royster (1914-1996), was in his day one of the most respected and influential journalists in America. As the editor-in-chief of "The Wall Street Journal" from 1957 to 1970, he won 2 pulitzer prizes and transformed the Journal into one of America's major newspapers. Yet this memoir is far more than just the story of Royster's tenure as the Journal's editor. It is also an eloquent and nostalgic account of his boyhood and adolescence in Raleigh, North Carolina. Royster writes wonderfully of what it was like to grow up in what was then one of North Carolina's most distinguished families. One of his more entertaining tales is of how he obtained his unusual name. It seemed that Royster's great-grandfather decided to name all of his children after states, so they would "stick out" in the Raleigh area. The names were outlandish: Louisiana Carolina Royster was a daughter's name, and some of the son's names were Arkansas Delaware, Wisconsin Illinois, and Iowa Michigan. (These names were so unusual that they were included in the "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" books). Mercifully they were called by their first and middle initials. Vermont's grandfather, for whom he was named, was Vermont Connecticut Royster. The Roysters were an unusually well-educated and successful family for the time (pre-Civil War), and one even taught Latin and Greek at the University of North Carolina. But the Civil War devastated the family - several of the older brothers were killed or crippled in the war, and Vermont's grandfather and namesake lost his chance at a college education because of it. To rebuild the family fortune, Vermont and his crippled brother Arkansas established the Royster Candy Company, which was a major success and sold candy all over Virginia and the Carolinas. Vermont's father inherited the family business, and Vermont's accounts of his childhood visits to the family's chocolate factory in Raleigh are delightful. Royster went on to become a somewhat rebellious and stubborn youth (and he leaves the impression that he must have been a stubborn and combative adult), but he did discover a talent for writing at the University of North Carolina, where he ran the student newspaper. Like many ambitious Southerners prior to the 1960's, he left the South after graduating from UNC and moved to New York, where he soon obtained a job as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, then a small (35,000 circulation) financial newspaper still struggling to recover from the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression. Royster spends a good deal of the book describing his slow but steady rise from the Journal's White House correspondent (where he covered Franklin Roosevelt) to editor-in-chief. This part of the book is filled with plenty of behind-the-scenes office politicking and power plays, and Royster often seems more of an amused onlooker than a participant. Another outstanding chapter in the book is Royster's account of his naval experiences in World War Two as the c