Byron Edgar Farwell (20 June 1921–3 August 1999), writer, was born in Manchester, Iowa, and was the son of Edward L. Farwell, manager of a telephone company office, and Nellie Shelden Farwell. The family later moved to Morgan County, Illinois. After attending Ohio State University for several semesters, Farwell joined the United States Army in 1940 and from 1942 to 1945 served as a captain of engineers attached to the Mediterranean Allied Air Force in the British Eighth Army, which took part in the invasion of North Africa. He rejoined the army in 1950 and served for two years during the Korean War. He married Ruth Saxby on 15 December 1941. They had two daughters and one son.
Farwell attended the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1949. Nearly two decades later, in 1968, he received an M.A. in English from the university. Beginning in 1954 he worked for Chrysler Corporation, including many years as director of administration for Chrysler International in Geneva, Switzerland. After retiring in 1971 he moved to Hillsboro, a small Virginia town of about 135 residents in northern Loudoun County.
Farwell served as Hillsboro's mayor (at a salary of $50 a year) for three terms, from 1976 to 1982. As mayor he worked to keep the town independent of state and federal government bureaucracies, which he believed would cost Hillsboro money. Farwell clashed with the Virginia Department of Health over efforts to regulate Hillsboro's natural water supply and with the United States Census Bureau in 1980 after five unsuccessful attempts to count the people and dwellings in the town. He resisted residential and commercial growth in the region, which he feared would turn bucolic Hillsboro into a crowded suburban community of nearby Washington, D.C. Farwell lost a reelection bid in 1982 after a 17–17 tie vote was decided with his opponent's name being drawn from a punch bowl. Farwell speculated that voters might have been upset at his decision to move the town's $30,000 cash reserves from a bank savings account to United States Treasury bills.
Farwell began a writing career during the 1950s as coauthor of a children's book, Let's Take a Trip in Our Car (1954), and as author of a booklet, Walter P. Chrysler: The "Skilled Mechanic" Who Became One of the Big Three in the Highly Competitive Automotive Industry (1957). His military service led him to write more than a dozen popular military histories and biographies. Focusing in large part on British colonialism, Farwell wrote The Man Who Presumed: A Biography of Henry M. Stanley (1957), a well-received biography of the news correspondent who went in search of the explorer David Livingstone, Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1963), Prisoners of the Mahdi (1967), Queen Victoria's Little Wars (1972), and The Great Anglo-Boer War (1976), which received critical praise.
Well-reviewed as being alternately serious and amusing, Farwell's Mr. Kipling's Army (1981) examined the British army at its height by focusing not on military conflicts but on ordinary soldiers, including their daily routines, training, discipline, and education. Continuing his theme of highlighting soldiers' experiences, in The Gurkhas (1984) Farwell examined the Nepalese Gurkha mercenaries who fought for Britain and subsequently India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Critics lauded his ability to convey the group's collective military history and illustrate the soldiers' personal stories. Farwell maintained a prolific pace for the rest of the decade and completed Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory (1985), The Great War in Africa, 1914–1918 (1986), and Armies of the Raj: From the Mutiny to Independence, 1858–1947 (1989).
Taking a pause from British history, Farwell published two works on the American Civil War, Ball's Bluff: A Small Battle and Its Long Shadow (1990), about the Union army's disastrous clash in October 1861 with Confederate forces near Leesburg, and Stonewall: A Biography of General Thomas J. Jackson (1992), before moving to World War I with Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917–1918 (1999). His last completed work, The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Land Warfare: An Illustrated World View (2001), appeared posthumously.
Farwell contributed many articles, commentaries, and book reviews to such publications as the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Washington Post, American Heritage, Harper's, Military History, and Smithsonian. He held a Wallerstein Fellowship at the University of Virginia's Institute of Government; lectured at the University of Chicago, the University of Detroit, and the Army War College; and was a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the Royal Society of Literature, and the Royal Geographical Society. He also sat on the board of Oatlands, a historic Greek Revival mansion near Leesburg. Byron Edgar Farwell died in a Loudoun County hospital of heart failure on 3 August 1999 and was buried in Hillsboro Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Biographical information, correspondence, and literary manuscripts in Byron Farwell Papers, University of Iowa; Certificate of Birth, Manchester, Delaware Co., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Record Group 48, State Historical Society of Iowa, State Archives, Des Moines, IA; other publications include Farwell, "'The Good Life' Meets the 5-Cents Cup of Coffee," Small Town 15 (Jan./Feb. 1985): 25–29, and "Race Relations in Rural Virginia: A Personal View," ibid. 16 (July/Aug. 1985): 26–29; articles and opinion pieces in Washington Post, 13 Apr. 1975, 15 July (portrait), 21 Sept. 1980, 26 July 1981, 6 May 1982, 26 Apr. 1987, 7 Aug. 1988; obituaries in Washington Post and Washington Times, both 6 Aug. 1999, and New York Times, 7 Aug. 1999.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Marc Leepson.
How to cite this page:
Marc Leepson, "Byron Edgar Farwell (1921–1999)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Farwell_Byron, accessed [today's date]).
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