EDWARD ROBB ELLIS was born in Kewanee, Illinois, in 1911. At fourteen he knew he wanted to become a journalist and an author. At sixteen he began keeping the diary that became the basis of his 1995 book, A Diary of the Century: Tales from America’s Greatest Diarist. The Chicago Tribune called Ellis’s diary “a jewel of Americana.”
As a newspaperman, he worked at the New Orleans Item, covering Huey Long, Louis Armstrong, the city’s hungry workers, and the French Quarter. In the 1930s he joined the Oklahoma City Times, writing about the Great Depression, the dust bowl, and Eleanor Roosevelt. As World War II began he was at the Peoria Journal-Transcript before moving to Chicago, where he became a feature writer for United Press. During the war Ellis edited a navy newspaper on Okinawa. In 1946 the Chicago Newspaper Guild named him the city’s best feature writer.
In 1947 Ellis joined the New York World-Telegram, where he worked for the next fifteen years, winning wide attention for his feature stories about world leaders, Nobel laureates, theatrical stars, and New York characters. After retiring from reporting in 1962, Ellis embarked on a career as a full-time author, publishing The Epic of New York City in 1966, which the New York Times called “a magnificent modern chronicle.” A Nation in Torment, Ellis’s narrative history of the Depression, received the Friends of American Writers Literary Award in 1970. Echoes of Distant Thunder, on the United States during World War I, was published in 1975. Ellis was also an associate editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City.
Mr. Ellis, whose books are cited in the bibliographies of such notable authors as Robert Caro and David McCullough, lived in New York City from 1947 until his death on Labor Day, 1998. He spent his days tending his 15,000-volume library and faithfully recording his life and times in the pages of his epic diary, which he deeded to the special collection of the Bobst Library at New York University.