William Ralston Balch

William Ralston Balch was an American journalist and author who wrote The Complete Compendium of Universal Knowledge, among other reference works. A supplemented edition of James Sanks Brisbin's biography of James A. Garfield, published in 1881, was credited wholly to him.

Biography

Born on December 9, 1852 in Leetown, Virginia, he began his newspaper work in the composing room of the Concord Monitor as a boy in 1871. He was connected with the London Bureau of the Associated Press for several years. Balch was responsible for the raising of the $500,000 fund of the London Daily Mail during the Boer War. In this work he secured the co-operation of Rudyard Kipling, whose poem, "The Absent-minded Beggar," which he wrote especially for this cause, brought so much money into the office of the Mail that it was decided to found a veterans' hospital at Portsmouth, England.
Balch contributed to the London Daily Mail an exclusive account of the impending death of Queen Victoria, developed out of a noblewoman's remark to her dressmaker that black would be the fashion that winter. In Boston he tracked down the suspected murderer Chastine Cox, who had long baffled the New York police. In 1879, he was managing editor of The Philadelphia Press, and later was connected with the Boston Daily Advertiser and Boston Herald.
When Balch served as a founding editor of The American in 1880, the magazine featured notable contributors like Henry Cuyler Bunner, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, Paul Hamilton Hayne, and Walt Whitman. In 1884, he wrote a biography of Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine. Balch was the author of the War Chronicle in the columns of the Boston Evening Transcript during World War I. He died on March 7, 1923 in Somerville Massachusetts.

Personal

Balch was the son of Rev. Dr. Lewis Penn Witherspoon Balch Jr. and his second wife Emily Wiggin Balch. Thomas Balch was one of his uncles.
On June 21, 1881, Balch married Elizabeth Singerly. They had one daughter.