Curtis Bill Pepper

His biographical novel, Leonardo (Alan C. Hood & Co., 2012), explores the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci, the formation of his universal mind, and development of his art as he emerged from a traumatic childhood – bastard son of a Circassian slave unwanted by his father, yet nurtured by the love of Albi his young stepmother who appears in his evolving portrayals of the Virgin Mary, culminating in a pregnant Mona Lisa.

A sixth book, We The Victors (Doubleday, 1984) emerged from a four-year study of 100 people who survived cancer, the critical survival factors, and how this altered their lives. Serialized in the U.S. and abroad, the book was initially featured on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

The third book, Christiaan Barnard: One Life (Macmillan, 1969) – a scripted autobiography of the South African surgeon, culminating in the first human-to-human heart transplant, was a main selection of the Literary Guild and the Reader's Digest Book Club with ten foreign editions. The novel Marco (Rawson Associates, 1977) prefiguring the Karen Quinlan-Terri Schiavo cases, was a Book of the Month Club alternate. A fifth work, Kidnapped! (Harmony Books, 1978), focused on the kidnapping industry in Italy through seventeen days of terror experienced by Paolo Lazzaroni, millionaire son of Italy's "Biscuit King".

He left Newsweek in 1966 to focus on his book writing.

His first book, The Pope's Backyard, was published by Farrar Straus in 1966. After he left Newsweek, his second book, An Artist and the Pope (Grosset & Dunlap, 1968) covered the friendship between Pope John XXIII and the Marxist sculptor, Giacomo Manzù. After sculpting new doors for St. Peter's Basilica, Manzù did a bronze portrait of Pope John and, eventually, the death mask of his beloved friend, with a cast of the hands that had written Pacem in terris. A Book of the Month and Catholic Book Club choice, it was condensed with a double cover in Life, and published in seven foreign editions.

After V-E Day, he remained in Italy to command a field unit investigating 143 alleged war crimes against U.S. Army and Air Corps personnel. Eventually retiring with rank of a major, he returned to Italy to study the Italian Renaissance at the University of Florence, and write a first, unpublished novel. At the same time, he free-lanced magazine articles and film scripts. In 1951, he joined the Rome bureau of the United Press, and three years later moved to CBS with special reporting for Edward R. Murrow. In 1956, as chief of bureau for Newsweek he produced cover stories on Italy's political leaders, film stars and directors, the death and election of three popes, the theology of the Second Vatican Council, profiles of kings, presidents and dictators in Jordan, Greece, Israel, Egypt, Tunisia, Spain and Yugoslavia.

Curtis Bill Pepper (August 30, 1917 – April 4, 2014) was an American journalist and author. Pepper was Newsweek's Mediterranean bureau chief in Rome from 1957 to 1969. He also worked for Edward R. Murrow at the Rome bureau of CBS, and covered the Vatican for United Press. Of his seven books, the last work, Leonardo, was a biographical novel of Leonardo da Vinci. It was conceived in the years following his studies of the Italian Renaissance at the University of Florence.