Why major histories often arrive decades after an event

Why did people who had just lived through World War II sometimes show less interest in writing its history?

Immediate books tend to come from journalists and participants; historians and later generations gain the distance needed for broader synthesis.

Immediate reporting differs from the slower work of historical interpretation. Journalists and participants are likely to produce the first books while memories and politics remain close to the event. Historians writing twenty or thirty years later can work with greater distance, and a generation with no lived memory may eventually produce the strongest syntheses. Readers should compare contemporary accounts, later scholarship, and retrospective histories because publication date shapes perspective.