The Churchill Biography (21 vols.!-Complete 8 vols. of biography and 13 companion vols. of Churchill documents) by Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert - 1966

London: Heinemann, 1966. First editions, first printings all. Fine/Near Fine. This is a complete set of the 8-volume official biography of Winston Churchill, together with the complete 13 companion volumes of Churchill's papers up to 1939 (Four additional volumes of his wartime papers were published later) All 21 volumes are the British first (i.e. "true first") editions, first printing All are in near fine to fine condition, and all include dust jackets There are some minor tears on several dust jackets, apparently from shelf wear, but the books themselves appear unread The companion volumes are all essentially pristine There is really nothing else in print to rival the scale and comprehensiveness of this set, which documents the life of one of the 20th century most important leaders (The last three companion volumes total nearly 5,000 pages by themselves!)

In 1966, Winston Churchill's son Randolph began writing a was intended to be a definitive, comprehensive biography of his father However, he had published only the first two volumes when he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1968, just three years after his father's death
Upon Randolph's death, the historian Martin Gilbert was asked to continue writing the multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill, which entailed reading the fifteen tons of documents, page by page In his memoir of that time, In Search of Churchill, he writes of how he saw his task:
What could be done for the Dardanelles campaign, and then for every subsequent controversy with which Churchill was involved (and there were far more than I had realized), was to explain exactly what he was trying to do, why he wanted to do it, how he set about it, and the way in which he confronted the various obstacles, whether of nature or of individuals, that were found along the way I wanted to be able to establish the chain of events and circumstances within which he worked
In addition to what became six narrative volumes, I continued work on the sets of document volumes, known as companions, which Randolph had begun The aim was, and still is, to make available to students and scholars, and to the general reader who enjoys the raw material of history, a comprehensive selection of the letters, documents, and other contemporary materials covering all periods of Churchill's life and career

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