America's foremost left-wing journalist of the post-World War I era was I.F. "Izzy" Stone. At the time of his death in 1989, Stone had completed the passage he once predicted to his wife "from pariah to a character and then . . . a national institution." Now Robert Cottrell provides the first full-length biography of Stone, a fascinating story which parallels the story of the American Left. 12 illustrations.

Popular Front columnist and New Deal propagandist, fearless opponent of McCarthyism and feared scourge of official liars, I. F. Stone (1907–1989)—magnetic, witty, indefatigable—left a permanent mark on our politics and culture. A college dropout, he was already an influential newsman by the age of twenty-five, enjoying extraordinary access to key figures in Washington and New York. Guttenplan finds the key to Stone’s achievements throughout his singular career—not just in the celebrated I. F. Stone’s Weekly—lay in the force and passion of his political commitments. Stone’s calm and forensic yet devastating reports on American politics and institutions sprang from a radical faith in the long-term prospects for American democracy. 

In an era when the old radical questions—about war, the economy, health care, and the right to dissent—are suddenly new again, Guttenplan’s lively, provocative book makes clear why so many of Stone’s pronouncements have acquired the force of prophecy.