Richard Pollak

Richard Pollak’s latest book is The Colombo Bay (Simon & Schuster, 2004), a dramatic account of his voyage on a container ship in the weeks after 9/11. He is also the author of The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim (Simon & Schuster,1997), which The New York Times called “a startling and thorough account of a life of lies.”

The Chicago-born Pollak graduated from Amherst College in 1957, after which he pursued a career in journalism at The Evening Sun in Baltimore, where he covered race relations and politics, and at Newsweek, where as an associate editor he wrote on a wide variety of topics, including the media. He was the founding editor of MORE, the monthly media review published in the 1970s, and edited and wrote the introduction to a collection of articles from the magazine, entitled Stop The Presses, I Want To Get Off! (Random House,1975).

After two lengthy visits to South Africa, he wrote Up Against Apartheid: The Role and the Plight of the Press in South Africa (Southern Illinois University Press, 1980). He is also the author of The Episode (New American Library, 1986), a novel that deals with epilepsy.

Beginning in 1979, Pollak began an association with The Nation, which he has served as executive editor, literary editor and currently as a contributing editor. He has written for that weekly as well as for Harper's, The Atlantic, The Progressive, The New York Times Book Review and other major magazines, as well as for the Times Op-Ed Page.

He has been a consultant for the Ford Foundation, The Twentieth Century Fund and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. While a Poynter Fellow at Yale University, he developed a course on "The Politics of Journalism," which he taught there and for several years at New York University. He lives in New York City with his wife, the pianist Diane Walsh.

Author photo by Joanne Savio.