Henry Serrano Villard

Henry Serrano Villard (March 30, 1900 – January 21, 1996) was an American foreign service officer, ambassador and author. He served as United States Ambassador to Senegal and Mauritania from 1960-1961.

Life Henry S. Villard was born in Manhattan, New York City March 30, 1900. He was the great-grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the prominent American journalist and abolitionist. He was the grandson of Henry Villard, the American railroad tycoon who commissioned the construction of the Villard Houses in Manhattan. His sister Mariquita Platov was a writer and pacifist.

As a teenager he served as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, becoming friends with Ernest Hemingway when both were patients in a Red Cross hospital in Milan. President Eisenhower sent him to Geneva in 1958 as the Representative of the United States to the European Office of the United Nations; he held that office 1958–60. President Eisenhower again called upon Villard in 1960 to fill the ambassadorial postings to the newly independent nations of Senegal and Mauritania, a dual posting to both nations while resident in Dakar, Senegal. Hemingway In Love And War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky, Her Letters, and Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway. Kurowsky is the inspiration for the nurse in A Farewell to Arms. Villard's book, coauthored with James Nagel, is the basis for the 1996 film In Love and War.

Other works include: Looping the Loop: Posters of Flight The Great Road Races, 1894-1914 Affairs at State: A career diplomat's candid appraisal of the U.S. Foreign Service Lincoln on the Eve of '61: A Journalist's Story Libya: The New Arab kingdom of North Africa Memoirs of Henry Villard, Journalist And Financier, 1835-1900 The Past and Present of the Pike's Peak Gold Regions The Royal Victoria Hotel