John Walter Lord, Jr. , was an American author, best known for his documentary-style non-fiction account A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Lord was born in Baltimore, Maryland to John Walterhouse Lord and Henrietta neé Hoffman. His father was a lawyer who died when Walter was just three years old. His grandfather, Richard Curzon Hoffman, was president of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company steamship firm in the 1890s. In July 1926 at the age of 9 he travelled across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Cherbourg and Southampton on the RMS Olympic, the sister ship... of the Titanic. Following high school at Baltimore's Gilman School, he studied history at Princeton University, graduating in 1939. Lord then enrolled at Yale Law School, interrupting his studies to join the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. During World War II, he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services as a code clerk in London in 1942. He was the agency's secretariat when the war ended in 1945. Afterwards, Lord returned to Yale where he earned a degree in law.
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