Editor and author Alfred Lansing is best known for Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, a historical account of Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 voyage to Antarctica, written for a young adult audience. Using diaries of expedition members and interviews with those still living, Lansing tells the story of the expedition, which met with disaster when their ship, the Endurance, was surrounded and eventually crushed by ice, leaving Shackleton and his crew trapped on the ice floes for five months before they were able to escape to open water in one of the lifeboats. In 1960, Lansing received both the Christopher Award and the Secondary Education Board's Book Award for Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage.
Alfred Lansing was born in Chicago in 1921. He served in the U.S. Navy throughout World War II, receiving the Purple Heart. Upon leaving the Navy in 1946, he returned to school, attending North Park College for two years and then transferring to Northwestern University. He worked as a writer for United Press and for Collier's magazine, as a freelance writer, and later as an editor for Time, Inc. Books.
Lansing died in 1975. He and his wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1955, had two children.
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