The Library Company's 293rd Annual Dinner

For nearly 300 years, the Library Company has gathered annually to celebrate our steadfast commitment to learning. We are excited to invite you to join us at this celebration of history, scholarship, and education. 

The 293rd Annual Dinner will be hosted in-person at The Down Town Club, 600 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106

Nimitz at War, by America’s preeminent naval historian, provides the first full-length portrait in over fifty years of the man who won the war in the Pacific in World War II, and whose leadership qualities have been exhibited by few other commanders in history.

Symonds offers an absorbing and illuminating portrait of how the quiet, unassuming man from the Hill Country of Texas transformed the devastated and dispirited Pacific fleet into the most powerful naval force in history. Using Nimitz’s headquarters – the eye of the hurricane – as his vantage point, Symonds captures Nimitz’s composure, discipline, homespun wisdom, and most of all, his uncanny sense of when to assert authority and when to pull back.

Dr. Craig L. Symonds is Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Naval Academy, where he taught for thirty years. From 2017 to 2020 he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of seventeen books, the most recent of which is Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay (Oxford University Press, 2022).

He has been awarded the Lincoln Prize, the Roosevelt Prize, the Morison Prize, and the Barondess Prize, as well as the Dudley Knox Medal for Lifetime Achievement and the Pritzker Military Museum & Library Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. He and his wife Marylou live in Annapolis, Maryland.