Stone, I. F.

Stone, I. F., 1907–89, American journalist, b. Philadelphia as Isidor Feinstein. Raised in New Jersey, he moved to New York City shortly after beginning his career as a journalist. Later moving to Washington, D.C., he served as an editor of The Nation (1940–46) and subsequently worked on a series of daily newspapers. In 1953 he began his own journal, I. F. Stone's Weekly, which in 1967 became I. F. Stone's Bi-Weekly; it was published until 1971. In his writing, Stone concentrated on U.S. foreign policy, on the government's justification for that policy, and on the way America's mainstream press reported on these subjects. A determined opponent of the cold war and domestic loyalty measures in the 1950s, Stone was one of the most influential liberal journalists of the postwar period. Late in his life he wrote The Trial of Socrates (1989), a product of his study in his later years of classical Greek.

See K. Weber, ed., The Best of I. F. Stone (2006); A. Patner, I. F. Stone: A Portrait (1990); biographies by R. C. Cottrell (1992), M. MacPherson (2006), and D. D. Guttenplan (2009).

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