John Chamberlain

John Rensselaer Chamberlain (October 28, 1903 – April 9, 1995) was an American journalist, business and economic historian, syndicated columnist, and literary critic who was dubbed "one of America's most trusted book reviewers" by the libertarian magazine The Freeman. Early life Born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1903, John Chamberlain attended the Loomis Institute in Windsor, Connecticut, and graduated from Yale University in 1925, where he was chairman of the campus humor magazine The Yale Record. He began his career in journalism at the New York Times in 1926, serving there as both an editor and book reviewer during the 1930s. Later, he worked on the staff at Scribner's and Harper's magazines. Serving on the editorial staffs of Fortune (1936–1941) and Life (1941–1950), for a time he wrote the editorials for Life under the direction of Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Inc. Chamberlain was a member of the Dewey Commission and a contributor to Not Guilty: the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials (1938) by John Dewey. For most of this period, Chamberlain was, in his own words, "a New York literary liberal" involved in political causes of the Left.