Kenneth Roberts (author) - Journalism

Journalism

After graduation, Roberts spent eight years working as a newspaperman for the Boston Post. In 1917, he enlisted in the American army for World War I, but he ended up as a lieutenant in the intelligence section of the American Expeditionary Force Siberia in the Russian Civil War instead of at the front in Europe. The contacts that he made in that role enabled him to become a European correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post after the war, where he became the first American journalist to cover the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler's first attempt to gain power. Roberts described working for the Post's legendary editor George Horace Lorimer as follows: "I told him my ideas, which he instantly rejected or accepted.... The price to be paid for a story was never discussed, and Lorimer was always generous."