About Ted Morgan

Ted Morgan was born Count Sanche Charles Armand Gabriel de Gramont in Geneva.

He is the son of Gabriel Antoine Armand, Count de Gramont (1908–1943), a pilot in the French escadrille in England during World War II. Gramont is an old French noble family.

His father was the son of the 11th Duke of Gramont and his third wife, Maria of the Princes Ruspoli.

After his father's death in a training flight, Morgan began to lead two parallel lives. He attended Yale University (where he was a member of Manuscript Society) and worked as a reporter. But he was still a member (albeit a reluctant one) of the French nobility. He was drafted into the French Army where he served for two years from 1955 to 1957, during the Algerian War, initially as a second lieutenant with a Senegalese regiment of Colonial Infantry and then as a propaganda officer. He subsequently wrote in frank detail of his brutalizing experiences while on active service in the bled (Algerian countryside) and of the atrocities committed by both sides during the Battle of Algiers.

Following his military service, Morgan returned to the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, Edition Time in 1961 for what was described as "his moving account of the death of Leonard Warren on the Metropolitan Opera stage." At the time, Morgan was still a French citizen writing under the name of "Sanche de Gramont".