Jim Hornfischer is president of Hornfischer Literary Management, and is one of the few agents in the country who is both a licensed attorney and a former New York trade book editor.  He lives with his wife, Sharon, and three children in Austin, Texas.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors is Jim Hornfischer’s first book – and the first book in sixty years to tell the story of the Battle off Samar, where a squadron of small US ships heroically upset a much larger Japanese battleship task force on 25 October 1944, thereby sparing GEN MacArthur’s Philippines invasion force from disaster.

Douglas Bennett, LCDR Bob Wassman, Teddie & LTjg Bob Hanley

LT William Adelaar, CAPT John Nash, CAPT Austin Volk

CDR John F. V. Cupschalk, Anna Briskie, Jamie Cupschalk

1933-1976

At the beginning of World War II, President Roosevelt appointed Samuel Eliot Morison as the nation’s official historian of naval operations during that war.  His only restriction was to safeguard information that would endanger national security.  He served on eleven different ships in both the Atlantic and Pacific.  The result of his work is a unique “shooting history” of 16 extraordinary volumes; the only work of its kind created to date.  He was a Pulitzer Prize winning author, a Trumbull Professor of American History Emeritus at Harvard, and a Retired Rear Admiral in the United States Naval Reserve.

Admiral Morison died on 15 May 1976 in Boston.  The credo borne on his gravestone, at his request reads, “Dream dreams, then write them – aye, but live them first.”