Sayre, Joel, 1900-1979

Joel G. Sayre (1900-1979) was a journalist, author, screenwriter, and foreign correspondent.

Raised and educated in Ohio, he served in the Canadian Army's Siberian Expeditionary Force during World War I and later studied at Oxford and Heidelberg. Returning to the United States, he covered sports and crime stories for newspapers in several cities, including Boston and New York, and wrote for the New Yorker. He wrote two successful novels and worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter on several films, including Gunga Din, and collaborated with William Faulkner on The Road to Glory. As a correspondent for the New Yorker during World War II, he covered the Persian Gulf Command, the Teheran Conference and the closing months of the war in Germany. A journalist and screenwriter in the post-war years, he taught at the Annenberg School of Communications from 1960-1971. He married Gertrude Lynahan Sayre, who died in 1960; their daughter, Nora Sayre, was an author and cultural historian. Sayre died on September 9, 1979.

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