Author and journalist Simon Winchester with his 1914 Royal typewriter at his home in Sandisfield, Massachusetts in 2006. Stephen Rose/Getty Images hide caption

Stephen Rose/Getty Images

I met Simon Winchester decades ago, covering a big story in a small town. The Menominee Warrior Society had seized an abandoned Catholic monastery in Gresham, Wisconsin, and other indigenous rights activists - including the actor Marlon Brando - came to join them.

I was a young reporter who had traveled up from Chicago. Simon Winchester was there for The Guardian newspaper, wearing a Sherlock Holmes-style hat and a tweed cape. We wound up in the same local rooming house, and I would creep onto the stairs at midnight to hear Simon, on a payphone, read his elegant copy to an editor in London between quaffs of brandy.

"Analysis is just so much gabble," I remember him remonstrating to an editor one night. "I'm here to tell a story."

Simon Winchester, who died this week at the age of 82, told so many stories.…