Biography

Jon Ewbank Manchip White (22 June 1924 – July 31, 2013) was the Welsh American author of more than thirty books of non-fiction and fiction, including The Last Race, Nightclimber, Death By Dreaming, Solo Goya, and his final novel, Rawlins White: Patriot to Heaven, published in 2011. White was also the author of a number of plays, teleplays, screenplays and volumes of short stories and poetry. White was born in 1924 in Cardiff, Wales, to shipping company owner Gwilym Manchip White. When White was young his father contracted tuberculosis, and at the age of eight White was sent away to boarding school in England to reduce his risk of infection.

White did well enough in school to earn an Exhibition in English to St Catharine's College, Cambridge in 1941, and studied there until enrolling in the Royal Navy in 1943 to fight in World War II. After initially putting to sea helping to ferry men and supplies across the English Channel, White joined the Welsh Guards, where he served until the end of the war. On VE Day, White met his future wife, nurse Valerie Leighton. They have two daughters, Bronwen (Bronwen White) and Rhiannon (Rhiannon White Kirkpatrick) whom they named for characters in The Mabinogion, the book of Welsh mythology.

White returned to Cambridge after his military service, and in 1950 he graduated with an Honours degree in English, prehistoric archaeology, and oriental languages, receiving a diploma in anthropology. White's Egyptology studies earned him an offer to work for the Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Department at the British Museum, but he opted instead to become a story editor for the newly created BBC Television Service, where he read scripts and worked on episodes of his own, including serial adaptations of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford and his own Witch Hunt, famous - or notorious - for depicting the first, if brief, scene of a group of men and women, all naked, engaged in sexual congress.

After a brief stint in the British Foreign Service, White went back to writing for television and film, including five years spent travelling and living in places such as Madrid and Paris, as a script doctor with Samuel Bronston Productions. There amongst other Bronston productions, he made contributions to such epic films as El Cid and 55 Days at Peking. He was also a script doctor on the science fiction film The Day of the Triffids. Later he finished his movie career as Walt Disney's European story editor, based in Berlin. By 1962, White was back to writing for television, including writing an episode of The Avengers (Series 2 episode).

Throughout his film and television career, White was a prolific writer of novels and nonfiction, including books on travel, art and anthropology. In 1967 White left screenwriting and the UK behind to move to the United States and become writer-in-residence at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he began the school's creative writing department and eventually became a full professor. Ten years later White was hired by the Department of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he became the Lindsay Young Professor of English and founded another creative writing department. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Phi Beta Kappa, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and of the Welsh Academy.