Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965) was one of the most significant statesmen of the 20th century. He was British Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945, and again from 1951 to 1955. Churchill also wrote several historical, political, and biographical works, published newspaper articles, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. 

When Edward Steichen took Churchill’s portrait in 1932, he was on a lecture tour in the United States, where he read from his autobiography My Early Life. The picture was published in Vanity Fair in April 1932.