Why England Slept US$40,000 in royalties for Kennedy. Those from the British sales were donated to Plymouth, England, recently bombed by the Luftwaffe, while Kennedy bought a Buick convertible with his income from the book's North-American sales. Joseph Kennedy had initially approached Harold Laski to write the book's foreword, but Laski declined, feeling that it was "the book of an immature mind; that if it hadn't been written by the son of a very rich man, he wouldn't have found a publisher." Why England Slept Why England Slept is the published version of a thesis written by John F. Kennedy while in his
Why Britain is at War of Parliament (MP) for Leicester West. Nicolson had been among the few MPs to raise questions in the House of Commons about the threat of fascism. On 25 September 1939, Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, commissioned Nicolson to write a Penguin Special of 50,000 words to present to the British people the reasons why they were at war with Germany, and why it was so crucial to defeat Nazism. The book quickly became a bestseller and sold 100,000 copies and had three reprints by February 1940. Anthony Eden wrote to Nicolson that he was "very much in favour